


Rose of My Heart

by bluesyturtle



Series: Flesh and Blood [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Ancient History, Angelic Lore, Biblical References, Clairvoyance, Demon Hannibal Lecter, Dreams, Empathy, Fallen Angel Will Graham, First Meetings, Food, Gen, Hallucinations, M/M, Mental Instability, Mind Manipulation, Mistaken Identity, Past Lives, Precognition, Prophetic Visions, Retrocognition, Seizures, Supernatural Elements, Telepathy, Will Graham's Dogs - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 17:19:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 65,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1355476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jack Crawford asks Will Graham to come with him to Quantico, he sets off a chain reaction of events all surrounding the past and identity of his new special agent, who happens to be a fallen angel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Help Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darkenergies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkenergies/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chilton wakes up in an airport, but at least he’s not in an ice bath missing a kidney.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Oh come down from Your golden throne to me, to lowly me / I need to feel the touch of Your tender hand / Release the chains of darkness / Let me see, Lord, let me see_

Pain in his ear, creeps down the back of his neck like a degenerative disease freezing up his blood in his veins and shutting his body down. Pain; there's a lot of pain, at first.

It gets warmer, hot, almost.

Webs close in tightly around him, stifling him, curdling his presence of mind. The suggestion is a wave; starts as little more than mist and swamps him, knocks him off his feet, and holds him under.

It whispers his name in a tone warm like the filmy taste of honey coating his palate. It calls him to sleep and be peaceful, and when he struggles against it, the onslaught hits him harder, heavier, and intense in a way that gets under his skin and pulls inward and keeps him swaddled within himself. She twists in him like nausea or happiness or disease or fear.

Her name is a word taken from a language he swears he knows that means _you will submit_. Her voice is the change of seasons carried on the winds whispering, _Submit to me_. Her hands sink into his and steal his purpose and his rhythms. His body is her instrument, and the song she uses him to play croons, _You’re my darling puppet, Frederick. See how prettily you dance._

He does dance, but his memory of the steps slides away from him. She smiles with his mouth and promises not to stay.

Something about her is masculine. Something about her is feminine. The same leap one makes when detecting the smell of smoke in another’s hair, clothes, fingers; the pungency exclaiming carcinogens. The trace she leaves in him exclaims transcendence of observable gender, observable identity, observable presence, existence, pathology, madness, melancholy, being, being, being…

Through the darkness he thinks he sees a face, first angry and then helpless, wondering. He sees the face, the eyes, the dark curls spilling over a pale, sweating forehead. He thinks to love the face, but she hates it.

She hates it, she hates it, she hates it…

_Rest, Frederick, I’ll be gone soon._

Chilton is losing his mind.

There’s another voice in his ear, transformed. It’s familiar almost, like seeing a portrait of himself with his silhouette taken out and only the colors remaining, meshing and running together, turning him into a puddle of unshackled saturation and hue. The second voice leaves, and he fights the way he did when he noticed her initial attack on him. It’s no use. She will always be stronger than him.

There’s roaring in his ears, sends his stomach crashing like nerves. He shivers, and the cleansing violence of it frees something locked inside of him. He worries. Before he can stand to open his eyes to the light burning straight into his brain like a hot metal poker, he worries that it’s always been there. He’s afraid it’s always existed in the back of his mind, at the very bottom of his heart, burbling and groaning beneath the surface, just waiting for him to succumb to it.

_You will submit. Submit to me._

_You’re my darling puppet, Frederick. See how prettily you dance._

“Frederick,” someone calls him from…probably his right.

He looks, squinting and mumbling gibberish slanted at the end like a question. The voice calls him again from farther away.  
 _  
Your other right,_ he reprimands himself as he’s twisting around stiffly in his seat.

He is sitting. He feels with his hands to confirm, and he is. He stamps slightly with his feet, and he is, solid ground, shoes, tile, and people talking and laughing all around him but not at him. Chilton blinks, swipes leadenly at his face.

Hannibal approaches him through the noise, head cocked to one side and an entertained expression on his face. Chilton has the presence of mind to frown, though his words aren’t quite as forthcoming.

“You look worse for wear,” Hannibal declares in that casually graceful way of his.

Chilton yearns to say something clever and vaguely playful, but his head is pounding. Hannibal crouches before him, half a step to Chilton’s right, and watches him with a flicker of amusement sprinkled across his impassive face. The sun streaming in through the huge windows opposite them throws darkness over the natural shadows under his brow bone, his cheeks, and mouth. There’s enough sunlight in the room that Chilton can see him anyway, but he wants to say something about the light, wants to say something about duality or the Apollonian and the Dionysian, wants to crack a joke because Hannibal stares at him, but nothing comes.

Hannibal saves him from the silence.

“You’re home, Frederick.” They look around, and Hannibal amends, “You’re in an airport about fifteen minutes from home.”

“How’d I…” He swallows, shakes his head. “Jesus, was I mugged getting off the plane?”

“You may be jetlagged,” Hannibal concedes. “Perhaps you were drinking last night.”

“Are you suggesting I have a hangover?” It’s the worst kind of defense, and really, Chilton can hear what he sounds like. If he remembered anything at all from yesterday, he might at least have a point of reference, but he’s got zilch to work with. Hannibal’s still looking at him, so Chilton tries to laugh it off, self-deprecatingly. “Where’d I go? Vegas? I didn’t get married, did I?”

Hannibal, bless him, smiles and chuckles along with him, companionably. Warmly he says, “You went to New Orleans.”

“Why did I go there?” Chilton smacks his lips delicately and attempts to sit up straighter in his seat. He’s been slouching and zoning out since Hannibal summoned him out of his dreams, which he’s fighting now to remember. He clears his throat, hands supporting him on the smooth armrests of the chair. Gruffly he tacks on, “Mardi Gras’ not for another three months.”

“You only called me last night to ask if I could retrieve you from the airport. I didn’t know you left Baltimore before we spoke on the phone.”

“Well,” Chilton replies dryly, not knowing where to go with that information. “Did I tell _you_ what at least inspired me to go?”

Easily, Hannibal answers, “I believe you were quite fascinated with the case Jack Crawford was sent to investigate.”

“La Croix Tueur,” Chilton names both the case and the killer, in custody, the last he read. He revises, “Charlotte Tasse and Matthew Bennett, according to the papers.”

“There was a consultant I’m sure you’ve also read about, wounded in the line of duty.”

“Yes.”

Chilton nods and rouses himself to try standing when Hannibal does. He’s not so wobbly in a physical sense as he is dizzy and fraught with a migraine. Keeping upright is not the problem; keeping gravity from seducing him too far in any one direction is the issue. For a few moments he just stands stock still, orienting himself. Hannibal keeps his hands in his pockets, trusting Chilton, apparently, not to need his steadying hands. He looks relaxed and focused, still standing on the wrong side of the noontime sun. 

Stalling for time, Chilton asks, “What was his name?”

“Will Graham,” Hannibal supplies after a beat.

“Unfortunate bit of business to get caught up in a firefight like that; what kind of cards did the guy have to draw to end up in cahoots with Jack Crawford _and_ get himself shot his first week on the job?”

“It was only his first week,” Hannibal replies stoically, analytically. “He caught the killer for them. Are you uncurious as to how he did it?”

“Oh, I’m very curious,” Chilton admits, comfortable in his brazenness around someone who accepts and often encourages it. He shrugs as part of his response. “I must be; I did go to New Orleans.”

Nonchalance fits Hannibal like string music fits a masquerade ball, faintly maudlin but ever impressive to stand still beside and just observe. He moves out of Chilton’s way when he test a small step and then another. Chilton feels and detects, with no small amount of irritation, that he must look so oafishly beleaguered fumbling and hobbling beside the light- and sure-footed Hannibal Lecter.

He wonders if Hannibal’s dance partners ever experience that daunting sense of dissatisfaction trying to keep up with him. Never mind people who partner with him in any other sort of way.

It occurs to Chilton that he’s suffering from an inferiority complex as a result of jetlagged drunkenness and that he needs to stop it before he goes looking for a ruler or some measuring tape. Really, he must have fallen asleep _and_ woken up in a bottle of Jack.

“Perhaps you wished to throw in your hat for consideration.”

Before he understands to what Hannibal is alluding he mumbles, “What hat? Oh, for what, I mean; consideration for what?”

“Alana Bloom has been screening therapists for the man, Will Graham.”

“Oh, has she?” His interest blossoms like dye tinting clear water. “I suppose there’s a rather large pool to sort through.”

He means to suggest that Hannibal must be up for consideration; he must be if Chilton is.

“Really, Hannibal, the woman adores you. Do you think the rest of us could even compete?”

Hannibal glows when he hears the first half of what Chilton says to him. The sight makes Chilton beam a little in response. The funny, bright glint in his eyes and the minute tug at the corner of his lips is contagious, apparently.

“Dr. Bloom’s relationship with me has always been purely professional. She is a woman of integrity.”

“Well, that’s all good and fine,” Chilton begins, drawling around his vowels and raising his eyebrows at Hannibal once they really get to walking. Hannibal’s always been like a balm for Chilton, restorative where a great majority of people tend to condescend and insinuating where others tend to declare brashly. “I’ve got to say, though, Hannibal, if the only thing keeping you is integrity, you’re a better man than most.”

Again Hannibal smiles, though maybe it’s just a touch hollow where it read as much fuller to Chilton just a few minutes ago. He makes a note not to joke about Alana Bloom again in case there’s a saucy, sentimental story to be delivered in the near future.

When they get out into the parking lot Chilton breathes and sighs and probably puts both hands on his face and in his hair. Some vague oppression that had haunted him, had sat like tightly coiled energy in the pit of his stomach, lifts off him at last. His steps fall more easily, and his hands have a better idea of what to do than dangle indecisively, confusedly at his sides. Hannibal awards him with an entertained smile for his frolicking, and Chilton is not ashamed in the slightest to consent to the word.

“Were you interested in Will Graham? Since it looks like he’ll be headed your way when Jack Crawford brings him back, I mean.”

A few seconds pass, and Hannibal pretends to consider it, pretends to look conflicted as if the question begged something much more comprehensive than a simple yes or no. Finally Hannibal nods once, roots around intentionally in his pocket for his car keys, and aims as he clicks. The gesture and the subsequent toggling of the car horn triggers some distant memory rattling around in his brain.

He chases after it like a boy chasing fireflies in the darkness, but it eludes him. He only hears some eerie whisper urging him to do something. The words are disjointed fragments, recognizable but disfigured. He wants to give his permission. He wants to surrender.

“More interesting than Will Graham’s involvement with the FBI is how he came to be discovered by Jack Crawford in the first place,” Hannibal’s voice sails through Chilton’s inner monologue.

He’s buckling into Hannibal’s car and looking out through the windshield. It’s a strange oddity, the gaps in time.

“How do any two people meet?” Chilton muses back, feigning disinterest to hide his confusion.

“Perhaps it was through the grace of God,” Hannibal jokes, smiling as the engine turns over. “Perhaps he was summoned through the works of some powerful magic beyond our understanding.”

“Perhaps he walked into the police station and volunteered his hands for the cause,” Chilton offers cheekily.

“We may never know.”

It might just be that Hannibal quipping with him through his mask of a straight face calms Chilton or maybe it’s something to do with his brain chemistry finally evening out, but he sinks back into the seat and lets Hannibal drive without pushing too hard against his freely given humor. It feels tacky to revel too much; the thought just makes him uneasy where usually it only riles him further.

After some more driving has happened and Chilton has succeeded in maintaining the mutual silence, Hannibal asks, “Are you hungry?”

“Famished,” he replies on instinct.

Hannibal takes a different exit off the freeway and steers them toward his home, taking streets Chilton recognizes and can name going off sight alone. He’s asking if Chilton likes prosciutto, and Chilton says something to the effect of liking anything Hannibal cooks. A ghost of a smile sits on Hannibal’s lips the remainder of the rider, and they don’t speak and the radio doesn’t interrupt the quiet.

“Do you ever feel like you’ve been hacked?”

“Hacked?”

Hannibal looks over his shoulder at Chilton, does something interesting and precise with the hand holding the spatula that causes the pan to make a great sizzling sound. Chilton looks around at the pristine, black-and-white kitchen, forgetting if he blacked out again or if he just hadn’t been paying attention. For a few long seconds he wonders what the difference could be.

“It’s the most bizarre thing. I swear I’ve come off something…encumbering.” Chilton is unsure, and he sounds it. Hannibal looks concerned but prepared to hear him out. He removes a thin, burn-red sheet of prosciutto from the pan and lays it gingerly over a toasted piece of focaccia. When he glances back at Chilton before scorching something else in the pan that makes the whole room smell of salt and vinegar, Chilton continues, “I can’t remember a single thing I did in New Orleans. I’m half-inclined to believe I didn’t _go,_ but the crumpled plane ticket in my coat pocket says I very much _did_ go.”

Gravely, Hannibal asks, “Are you currently taking any medications, Frederick?”

“I…No,” he exclaims, a touch too defensively. He dials back. “No, I’m not.”

“I cannot account for what you may have done or seen in Louisiana, but it may just be the case that a person or persons interfered with you.”

“Well, I’m not…At least I don’t _feel_ like someone _did_ anything to me. I was a little groggy waking up, but I’d notice by now if something was wrong and I feel perfectly fine.”

It’s a lie, and he’s sure Hannibal hears that it is.

“Then in that case, believe that you are perfectly fine,” Hannibal says in a mild, agreeable tone.

He switches off the fires on the stove and collects two plates loaded with Roma eggs served on thick bread slices. Chilton rises and lets Hannibal herd him into the dining room. While he sits, Hannibal explains the etymology behind the word _prosciutto_ : throws around words like _exsuctus_ and _exsugere_.

“These essentially suggest a sucking out of moisture or vitality,” Hannibal announces, sweeping into the room with a bottle of Crémant and two glasses. Chilton smirks as Hannibal pours. Softly, as if he were sharing a great and terrible secret, Hannibal recites, twisting the bottle and pulling away from Chilton’s glass to pour into his own, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

Chilton hums and asks, “What are its lowest terms, I wonder?”

“Whatever it is that waits for us on the other side of that Spartan existence.”

Hannibal seats himself and gestures for Chilton to begin. He tastes the Parmesan adorning the topmost part of the sandwich in between the egg and the slice of warm, toasted bread. It’s a nice culmination of flavors, and it pairs excellently with the bubbly, subtlety of the champagne. 

Chilton makes little circling motions with his glass, not really swishing but just experimenting with the ways the light reflects and sometimes absorbs, terrifyingly, into the trap of lazy middle-of-the-day alcohol.

“Are we celebrating?”

“Safe returns home are always worthy of celebration,” Hannibal agrees, raising his glass to Chilton’s, which has wilted slightly in his grasp. “Are you certain you feel all right?”

“Oh, yes,” Chilton replies emptily. “I’m perfectly all right.”

“Are you worried something untoward could have happened in the time you cannot account for?”

Hedging, he says, “An ungovernable human being is an ungovernable danger in our line of work, is he not?”

“If his inclinations while he is unaware of his actions tend toward danger, yes, he is.” Hannibal tilts his head a fraction to the left, and it is the only sign he gives that he is invested in the conversation. “Are you dangerous, Frederick?”

Laughing weakly, he says, “Are you?”

“I suppose if I had to be,” Hannibal murmurs and takes a sip of the Crémant.

“That is a very wholesome, standard answer.” Chilton nods generously, tearing into the last half of the Roma eggs on his plate. “I’d expect nothing less from a man so concerned with integrity.”

It isn’t said to pry or rib or insult. Chilton just says it, tapping into older pieces of their conversation while his mind wanders, trying to retrieve pieces he lost in Louisiana. He doesn’t think anything of his words except Hannibal’s expression darkens and closes off in a way that unnerves him.

A very ancient, reptilian part of his brain warns him to be afraid, but he shakes that off. It’s the sensible thing to do. It’s not like Hannibal will leap across the table and try to do him harm.

_I didn’t harm a hair on his head._

He whips around in his chair, searching for a voice that’s a blend of his own and something deeper and more complex than sound or memory can provide. It burns in his mind like an undertone synthesizing a song from his childhood and changing its entire meaning through that one shift in the notes.

_Listen to you._

“Frederick?”

_I_ said _I didn’t harm him._

“What?”

Hannibal’s mask is gone, and he only looks disconcerted.

“You were talking to yourself.”

“Was I? Oh.”

They watch each other for a moment, and Chilton has to ask, so he does: “What did I say?”

Hannibal tells him, and he doesn’t skip a single word. There’s some tension in Hannibal’s jaw, a kind of agitated, unconscious tick coming and then going and then coming again. Chilton apologizes. Hannibal waves him off.

“You should sleep once you are home,” Hannibal tells him in a small voice. “Sleep and stay hydrated.”

“Of course,” Chilton says. There’s nothing else he can say.

Hannibal drives him home twenty minutes later, and Chilton stares vacantly out the window. He alternates between keeping his eyes closed and trying to trick himself into a hypnotic state watching the trees and the houses whisk by. There’s no effort on Hannibal’s part to make him speak, but Chilton feels that introspection is an ill-fitting suit on him. He tries, once his home springs into sight at the end of the street, to rectify his lackluster mutism.

“When Bloom gives you Will Graham, expect trouble.”

He can’t explain why he says it, but it’s there, tugging at him, pulling him…inward.

_I told him you were alive._

He blinks and rubs at his forehead, and Hannibal speaks.

“I find that strife makes a reward sweeter to taste.”

Chilton laughs and presses his fingers gingerly to his eyes. The car creeps to a stop. Hannibal kills the engine.

“Do you think Will Graham will see you as a rival?”

There’s a hand on the back of Chilton’s head, neither clinical nor intimate but some crass middle ground in between. Chilton tries to look, but Hannibal is doing something to him, taking something that doesn’t belong to either of them but that Chilton doesn’t mourn.

“Invite me in, Frederick.”

“What?” He turns, astonished, breaking the connection between his scalp and Hannibal’s fingers. “Why?”

“You’re faint,” Hannibal answers readily. “What good will my supervision do you if I leave as you collapse behind a closed and latched door?”

“I don’t need to be supervised,” he protests, pertly throwing open his door and slamming it shut behind him. Hannibal follows him up in spite of Chilton’s angry glare and steadies him, humiliatingly, when he swoons. He says again, to drive the point home or maybe just to pacify himself, “I don’t need to be supervised.”

“Of course you don’t,” Hannibal grants him, taking Chilton’s keys and unlocking the front door.

Hannibal follows at a safe distance into the foyer and takes Chilton’s jacket before seeing him into the den. He picks it over the bedroom because he is _not_ having Hannibal traipse after him up the stairs in some bizarre show of concern that feels scarily like intimacy but really isn’t at all.

Honestly, Chilton has no illusions about the nature of their relationship.

“You’re not tucking me into bed, Hannibal.” He rolls his eyes and toes off his shoes while Hannibal hovers in the doorway halfway between the kitchen and the front door. Chilton falls into an armchair and sighs. “See, I’m not falling apart,” he notes in an overly simplistic, boorish tone of voice. “I’m going to have a nap.”

Hannibal strides into the room, and all right, he can play it that way, fine. Chilton watches him, some dull brand of defiance stirring up in his chest.

Placidly, he muses, “Has anyone ever told you that you own any room you walk into?”

“I believe I have heard the same said of Walt Whitman.”

“Ah, Walt,” Chilton hums as Hannibal takes a seat on the armchair across from him. He adds, stretching out his legs when he sees that Hannibal means to stay a while longer, “Also called a narcissist and borderline psychotic.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Hannibal counters.

“No one would have given a damn about Walt if he’d been perfect,” Chilton agrees, sinking into the armchair and humming vaguely. “Perfection is a myth.”

“And yet we all chase it.”

When he cracks open an eye to look, Hannibal is smiling small and only just bringing his eyes to Chilton’s.

“Yes, well, optimism is hard to kill.”

“It coexists alongside hope.”

“It makes its home there.” Chilton shrugs exaggeratedly and then slumps when his shoulders fall. “It roosts.”

Hannibal says something else, soft and indistinct and Chilton misses it. His head swims. Light filters in when his eyes drift open, but he sees nothing. All he has are shadows and scratches of whispers and the stagnating taste of grapes on his tongue.

_It calls him to sleep and be peaceful._

He jerks out his sleep, drawing long, ragged breaths. His forehead is cold with sweat. Hannibal is nowhere to be seen, so he heads upstairs to try sleeping in his bed. He’s tired enough; has the exhausted feeling in his limbs and in his neck like whatever sleep he got in Louisiana wasn’t real sleep. His everything aches, and not in any kind of way that suggests he enjoyed doing whatever it was that made his muscles so sore.

Stripped down to a shirt and boxers he twists the blinds closed and crawls under the blankets to cast his exhaustion out of him via bed rest. It doesn’t take long to slip under again, though there’s something there catching and twisting at his dreams, bending the light and moving the furniture around so it’s all unfamiliar and strange.

He sees himself, or rather remembers himself, standing in a darkened room and looking at a phone, but the screen powers down and cracks when he looks at it. The voice pinging around in his ears dies out.

_You’re welcome, Ose._

_You’re welcome._

_You are._

_Are you?_

He’s left with void and the shrill din of absolute silence, but he clutches the phone in his hand like a life-preserver. He clutches the phone until the screen flickers on and shows him the ghostly impressions of a face. He whispers the words to himself, _You’re welcome, Ose. You’re welcome, Ose. You’re welcome, Ose._

He whispers until his body burns and the muttered prayers become screams of agony. A lifetime passes with him screaming when the line finally breaks and the fire recedes. He shoots up in bed, drenched and shaking and swinging with all his might.

Swinging at Hannibal, he discovers a full two minutes after he calms down.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers hoarsely, mortified at himself. Hannibal presses a perspiring glass of ice water into Chilton’s hands and helps him to drink it in slow, patient draughts. “I thought you’d gone.”

“I did,” Hannibal says, taking the glass from Chilton so he doesn’t drop it. He sets it down on the bedside table and places his cool palm across Chilton’s forehead, and Chilton probably makes a very grateful sound at the change in temperature. “I suspected you might have a fever.”

“ _Spectacular_ ,” Chilton drawls when Hannibal removes his hand. He accepts the aspirin Hannibal slips into his hand and swallows the pills with water.

Hannibal sits with him as he comes down from his fever-dream and the fever itself. Chilton situates himself on the bed so his back is to the headboard with the blankets bunched up in his lap. He rolls his head around on the wall and decides.

“Could I tell you something impossible, Hannibal?”

“I have no doubt at all of your ability, Frederick.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he says carefully, dropping his chin and giving Hannibal a significant, fever-travel-hangover-addled look. “Could I tell you something impossible without seeming completely mad?”

“Yes,” Hannibal says with certainty and reserved confidence. “Would you like to invoke doctor-patient confidentiality?”

Chilton smiles with his eyes dropping closed, weary.

“Do I have to call you doctor?”

“Yes.”

Hannibal laughs when Chilton opens his eyes, and for a moment he feels lighter than the air itself, just laughing in a little less than his bedclothes with Hannibal—Dr. Lecter—sitting at his bedside in a chair he brought from downstairs.

“Maybe I should put on pants first,” he mumbles, barely self-conscious but concerned with propriety.

“You threw half of those blankets at my head while you slept. Your state of undress is of no consequence to me unless it bothers you.”

“No pants then,” Chilton decides after a prolonged moment of thoughtful consideration. “You’re getting to know me so well today.”

“Circumstances gave me an unfair advantage.”

“Circumstances,” Chilton repeats hollowly. “About that impossibility that I wanted to share with you.”

Hannibal waits, crosses his leg at the knee. His head tilts to one side; hands clasp atop the overlapping knee.

“Well, _doctor,_ ” he sighs, rubbing his hand over a tender spot on the back of his head. “There was something in my dream that might have…been a memory from Louisiana—or at least a clue of some sort.”

“What did you see?”

“There was a face,” Chilton says, recalling the image in his mind. It’s faded over now when he tries to summon it up.

_Perhaps it was through the grace of God. Perhaps he was summoned through the works of some powerful magic beyond our understanding._

Chilton falters, stitching the contours of that face together where he can but mostly drawing up a shattered mosaic, incomplete and roughly hewn about the edges. He swallows.

“I remember blue eyes, or they could have been green.” He kneads around the bruised section of his scalp. “They could have been at least six different colors, and that’s based only on what the light did to them.”

“You sound enamored,” Hannibal muses, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward slightly.

“It’s the only solid thing I remember about it,” he retorts, not defensive but definitely with a hint of petulance.

“Was it a man or a woman?”

Chilton sits back, eyes the ceiling and accepts the glass of water when Hannibal offers it. He swishes the cold water around his mouth a moment before swallowing, letting the cold seep into his gums and cheeks. He shakes his head.

“I can’t remember.”

“A picture is worth a thousand words. Perhaps you will see that face again and be reminded of what you lost.”

Hannibal’s tone isn’t dismissive, but it is final. Chilton raises his hand to keep him from changing the subject.

“There was a name, too.”

He blinks once, settles back into his chair, and crosses his legs again.

“Whose?”

Chilton doesn’t know what an exasperated face looks like, but he’s sure that emotion exactly manifests in his expression because Hannibal tilts his head again and rephrases the question: “What name?”

“Ose.”

A beat skips between them, flutters, really.

“Have you ever heard of this name?”

“Not that I can think of, no.” Chilton watches him for a response, and he gets nothing. “Have you?”

Hannibal sighs silently and says by way of answering, “Ose is a demon rumored to cause insanity. Some legends say he can assume the form of a leopard, and some call him a president of hell.”

Chilton laughs, a nervous, juddering sound. Hannibal doesn’t laugh or smile—why would he, Chilton reasons, he’s in doctor mode—so Chilton asks a semi-serious question.

“Do you know the etymology behind his name?”

“It may be traced to the Latin _os_ , meaning language or mouth; or _osor_ , denoting he that abhors.”

“I dreamed of a demon who causes insanity and whose name means hate,” Chilton deadpans.

Hannibal smirks, and the tiny gesture is so calming, Chilton doesn’t fight the smile quivering onto his own lips.

He mumbles into his hands, “Jesus, what did I get into over there?”

“I’m certain it would have made a very good story.”

“At least this isn’t the first vacation I’ve come back not remembering.”

Hannibal smiles and picks up the emptied glass of water before striding out of the room for a refill. Chilton reaches into the drawer beside his bed for his tablet and navigates onto TattleCrime.com, peruses through the older articles until he finds the one that links back to the Times-Picayune. He takes the glass of water and sets the tablet down in his lap with the website clearly illuminated, still on Freddie Lounds’ blog. Hannibal stares for a moment before reclaiming his seat.

“I’m curious. Do you think the name Ose could be attributed to the face you saw in your dream?”

Chilton sets the water down and clicks through to the Times-Picayune.

“It crossed my mind,” he admits, setting the tablet aside for later, not wanting to be rude. 

“But where would it lead,” Hannibal states plainly, a rhetorical question.

Chilton doesn’t have any kind of answer anyway.

“If I had gone to meet Will Graham, Jack Crawford would have known about it,” Chilton holds his index finger down. “I would have a visitor’s pass from the hospital he’s staying in—” he holds his second finger down. “More importantly, I would have received a very angry voicemail from one Alana Bloom, and I did not get one of those.”

He looks down at his three fingers and releases them, starting in on his other hand.

“The plane ticket in my pocket says I was in New Orleans last night. You received a call from me asking to pick me up at the airport at such and such a time. All I _can_ remember about that time is troubling and makes me question my sanity, which is, apparently, this demon Ose’s specialty.”

Hannibal chuckles, a small thing, an offering of comfort gladly taken.

“We are, of course, avoiding the highly psychological approach to this dream of yours.”

Chilton straightens out, sets his hands in his lap, and leisurely says, “Let’s hear it then, doctor.”

“I suspect you have a working knowledge of Latin,” Hannibal begins. Chilton nods, and he elaborates, “The name you remember, Ose, may represent your perception of your speech, or more narrowly adhering to the definition of the Latin _os_ , your mouth and your use of language. This name, a mere phantom, juxtaposes itself with a face that is nothing more to you than a pair of changeable, though beautiful eyes.”

Hannibal pauses in his breakdown of events, giving Chilton the opportunity to psychoanalyze _himself._

“I…desire the approval of someone,” he begins haltingly. “Someone whom I barely understand but who…”

_Osor, denoting he that abhors._

“Someone who can’t stand me.”

“Perhaps there is only one person in the equation.”

Chilton blanks momentarily.

Flatly he says, “I don’t hate myself, Hannibal.”

“Have you considered that you might not know yourself; that the broken visage you saw may have been your own?”

Chilton notes that Hannibal is careful not to use the words _reflection_ or _mirror._ He thinks to object when Hannibal continues.

“The object of this hatred—if it does exist within the parameters of this dream, and I am not convinced it does—would not be the Self but the speech, that which is transmitted by way of mouth. It could be indicative of deeply seated frustration with your personal relationships or perhaps even professional ones.”

The words Chilton had intended to say don’t fit with Hannibal’s proffered analysis. He doesn’t have time to flinch away from Hannibal’s hand when it slots against his forehead from the wrist to his knuckles. Chilton just waits.

The hand recedes and he says, “I keep a thermometer in the bathroom.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Hannibal tells him cheerfully. “We’ve broken your fever.”

“Thus ends the doctor-patient confidentiality,” Chilton announces blearily. His relief is interspersed with gratitude. “Now I should actually put on some pants.”

“There is no need for that,” Hannibal says, waving him off and rising to his feet. “I will see myself out.”

“Oh,” Chilton blurts out before closing his eyes in irritation at himself.

_I have no illusions about this._

“Thank you,” he says vaguely, hoping it covers what he means without giving too much away.

Hannibal just says, “You’re welcome, Frederick,” and takes the chair back downstairs. He comes back up a minute later to advise Chilton to try sleeping again even if it feels like a terrible idea.

Chilton says he’ll try, and try he does. He waits until he hears Hannibal’s car drive off; he waits ten minutes after that and looks out the window. When he gets back into bed he closes the blinds again. Hannibal must have opened them when he came back and woke Chilton up from his nightmare.

He deflates into the sheets and closes his eyes, and he’s dead tired. Coasting in between consciousness and unconsciousness the words play through his mind in his voice and in Hannibal’s voice.

_You’re welcome, Frederick._

_You’re welcome, Ose._

You will submit. 

Submit to me. 

_You’re my darling puppet, Frederick. See how prettily you dance._

_He that abhors._

Are you? 

You are. 

_Rest, Frederick, I’ll be gone soon._

Chilton is losing his mind, but at least he finally does sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Roma Eggs  
> http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Roma-Eggs
> 
> Etymology stuff and things  
> http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=prosciutto
> 
> Lucien Albrecht Crémant d’Alsace Brut   
> http://www.wine.com/v6/Lucien-Albrecht-Cremant-dAlsace-Brut/wine/12033/detail.aspx
> 
> Henry David Thoreau: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”
> 
> From Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (Rôti): “Somebody got inside his head and moved all the furniture around.”
> 
> If you’re curious about Ose  
> https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/4142841-inside-seven-x-demons---ose


	2. We’ll Meet Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team figures out what to do with Will in the aftermath of his shooting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Don’t know where / Don’t know when / But I know / We’ll meet again / Some sunny day_

“I guess maybe the mojo bags worked,” Barry murmurs by the coffee maker where Beverly is standing with Jimmy.

Will’s doctor, Archambault, cleared the room to talk to him about his injuries—or really, his lack thereof. There have been mysterious circumstances surrounding Will’s stay here going back two weeks now. Jack is starting to get impatient.

Beverly looks at Jimmy and whispers, “Mojo bag? What’s that?”

An embarrassed flush creeps across his face. He fidgets a bit.

“Um, it’s a local thing; Nurse Ingram told me about it.”

“Did you _mojo_ Will’s room?” She can’t help smirking even though she tries really hard to sound stern. “You purchased one, you, with your own money?”

Jimmy throws his hands, opening his mouth to speak but getting cut off by Barry before he can really do anything with his flapping lips. Barry doesn’t interrupt him with words, though. He just turns around, and when he does, he looks more solemn than Beverly ever thinks she’s seen him. It makes him look a lot older, or maybe it makes him look his age.

Earnestly, Barry says, “I should thank you for that.”

“I…” Jimmy frowns. As if it should be obvious he continues, “Well, even if I hadn’t, I would have said I did to keep you from getting into trouble. You only wanted to help him; Nurse Ingram, too.”

Barry deflates slightly at the mention of Saskia Ingram. They’d had trouble with a woman called Gwendolyn Roscoe saying she knew Will. Jack smacked down the story as soon as he heard the name, saying it stunk of Freddie Lounds. To make matters worse, Lounds had apparently followed up with Barry’s cousin in the police department, the one who’d just made detective.

It’s no surprise, then, that Archambault is pissed over the amount of shenanigans surrounding this patient of hers with the FBI detail loitering at his side and an accelerated healing rate no one can explain. They’ve been temporarily exiled from Will’s room in light of recent events. As if the whole ordeal hadn’t been sabotaged enough by the media’s new interest in Will, it now seemed their staff wasn’t properly equipped to handle the situation Jack thrust upon them.

Point and case, Saskia Ingram had blacked out at one point during her shift a few nights ago and the only patient she’d had in that time was Will. Barry’s rattled, and Ingram is nowhere to be seen. Jimmy looks pretty pale himself.

“Saskia’s been feeling really guilty about this whole mess since that woman called. I kept trying to tell her she got to Philant, too, and not to worry about it, but then the other night happened and now she’s scared to come back to work. I can barely get her to talk to me.”

Jimmy tries to console him: “Could it have been exhaustion?”

“Saskia balances the work better than the rest of us do. Sometimes she looks tired,” he concedes, shrugging. “But she told me this has never happened to her before. She’s convinced it was something…to do with your friend.”

Barry shakes his head sadly and starts to go for the hallway.

“Once Archambault’s done in there, you guys might be good to go. She’s sort of…at her limit, with everything that’s happened, and well, your friend’s not really sick, is he?”

His expression is apologetic and tired when he nods and turns to go. Jimmy heaves a heavy sigh and turns to Beverly.

“Has Will said anything to you about all that?”

“He hasn’t said much of anything since that night. He talks to the doctor, mostly.”

“I guess he’s not talking to Jack either?” Jimmy mutters, rubbing his face with his hands. “What the hell happened?”

“He just shut down,” she says, leaning back against the wall and closing her eyes. “I’ve noticed he hasn’t done that thing that he likes to do; the reverse empathy?”

“Oh, yeah,” he agrees. “I thought he seemed…more normal than usual.”

“Maybe when we get him home we can get Dr. Bloom to see him. I think he trusts her.”

“He seemed pretty chummy with Bowman, too,” Jimmy says. “That might be worth a shot. Jack probably already has plans for Will to see a psychiatrist once all this is behind us.”

“I think he’ll _have_ to invest in a shrink if he’s serious about bringing Will back to Quantico. He’s been on one case with us, and he’s already been shot and made into an unintentional celebrity.”

“Just imagine what the rest of the Behavioral Unit is going to say. He’ll be the talk of the town.”

Beverly rolls her eyes. The odds are very high Will might have to deal with even worse scrutiny on their own turf. She’s going to have to teach him how to throw a proper right hook before they leave Louisiana.

“Hey, guys?” Brian pokes his head around the side of the wall blocking them off from the bustling hallway. “The doctor just left. They’re getting ready to kick us to the curb, so, uh, we should regroup before we get scattered.”

Jimmy follows behind Beverly, and they file back into Will’s room. Jack is pacing along the foot of Will’s bed and Will is lying on his side facing away from the door. Jack looks up at them when they close the door behind them and muffle the noise trickling in from outside.

Jack says, “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

Beverly looks at Will’s motionless form and then at Brian’s stoic expression. She bumps Jimmy’s elbow, and he says, “The bad news first.”

Jack nods, staring hard at a spot on the floor before bringing his eyes up to the three of them standing in the doorway.

“Well, the bad news is the doctor says Will is at high risk for depression and PTSD, among other things. She thinks someone tortured him because those things on his back haven’t healed like everything else.”

Beverly winces. It had sounded so painful when it happened, like the very life was being ripped out of his body as his wings burned and withered away. She hadn’t seen them since that first night, but she hadn’t heard anything about them beyond the disastrous biopsy the surgeons had performed. His other wounds had more or less improved, scarred over, and faded, but the meat-colored grooves burned into Beverly’s mind apparently followed a different path of recovery than did the rest of Will’s body. Maybe it was part of his punishment, as he had called it.

“He didn’t deny it when she asked him if that’s what happened, so he’ll need to meet regularly with a psychiatrist when we take him home.” Jack sighs, “Which brings me to the good news: Dr. Bloom has agreed to find someone adequately equipped to deal with his situation.”

Beverly frowns. She says, “Bloom’s not going to look at him herself?”

“She said it wouldn’t be a good idea. Will might just benefit most from an objective outside party; one who isn’t already somehow involved in his life down here.”

“What does that mean?” Jimmy starts to move away from the door to stand nearer to Brian. He gesticulates slightly with his hands when he asks, “The next doctor won’t know what he was? How is that going to work?”

“There will be full disclosure with whomever she recommends to be his doctor,” Jack clarifies, raising his palms for Jimmy to take it easy.

“How is that going to be arranged?” Brian crosses his arms over his chest. “We sit down with whoever Bloom clears and divulge the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help us Will?”

“That’s not funny,” Will grumbles over his pillow.

Maybe it’s not, but it does win a triumphant smirk from Brian all the same. Jack glances hopefully in Will’s direction once he speaks but just nods gravely at Brian when nothing else comes. Jimmy’s looking at Will, too, and before Brian can say something sarcastic about the modified game plan, Jimmy says to him, “Do you want me to bring Lloyd from the station? He might not be busy what with the paperwork starting to wind down.”

The room is silent while Will deliberates. He says, “Yes, please.”

Jimmy’s smile is both victorious and relieved. He elbows Brian and nods his head to the door. Jack lets them go. His only response to the exchange that just happened is to warn them that they won’t be at the hospital for much longer and that they’d better take Bowman to the motel, not Interim LSU.

Beverly catches Brian’s arm before he can leave the room to ask if he’ll stay to drive Will back to the motel. There’s a stop she needs to make before they release Will back into the cold: the dry cleaners.

Since the shooting, Beverly had offered to replace his jacket with one that wasn’t stained all over with his blood, but he’d merely asked if there was any way to salvage the one she’d bought him initially. He’d mumbled something about patterns in the fabric and traces of all the places she’d handled it before slipping under the morphine tide hooked up to his arm. Oddly enough it was his only request; she supposes that’s the kind of thing a person worries about if the gunshot wound to his chest isn’t actually a matter of life and death.

She’d taken the halfway ruined thing to four dry cleaners before one grizzled woman took on the project. It was a lucky thing, too. Beverly was starting to lose hope. The woman had charged a fair enough price for it; she maybe even cut Beverly a break, seeing as how the jacket looked like a bloody Rorschach test once they’d gotten Will out of it.

She’s looking over the jacket at the counter when the beldame perched over the register says, “It goes deeper than their blood.”

“Excuse me?”

“This violence,” she explains, downcast eyes set on the wilted bag sheathing Will’s jacket. “Matthew Bennett grew up right about in these parts.”

“Did you know him?” Beverly asks after a moment of watching the woman for a sign of dishonesty. The shop is empty. Maybe it’s been empty since Beverly last came in. Aiming for sympathy, she offers, “A lot of people said they thought he was a good kid.”

“No such thing as good or bad; only deeds and words.”

“So you knew him then?”

The woman nods and takes Beverly’s payment for the services rendered.

“Did you know Charlotte Tasse?”

“Little Lottie, everyone called her.” The woman, wearing no nametag, ducks to look beneath the counter for something. Beverly steps in front of the register, casually putting an obstruction between them. The next second she’s looking at a framed photograph. The glass is balmy from the touch of many fingerprints. “They called Matthew _bébé Manu_ , after his father.”

“And then he grew,” Beverly says, noting the teeny boy in the photograph with his arm around a dark-skinned girl his size if not a little bit taller.

“Like an oak tree.” The woman nods to herself, touching the silver frame. It’s lost its shine and possesses a few dents for its troubles. “He loved that girl. God help him, but he did.”

Beverly’s interested in whatever history she can learn about Matthew Bennett and Lottie Tasse. They’ve worked so many cases that the many horrible things people do to each other meld together and fade into the background of her memory. Finding Will and learning about the kinds of impossibilities that exist in the world—and outside of it—have given her incentive to remember a few more positive things, especially about this case. She’s curious about the light in the darkness of the woman who was La Croix Tueur, and she’s equally interested in the boy who couldn’t let go of her.

“I’m sorry you lost them,” Beverly murmurs, referring not to their incarceration but to whatever event it was that lead them to the path they chose. Even if what they did was despicable, there are always other casualties than just the ones whose lives were taken.

“They could’ve had their freedom up here with the rest of us. They picked this.”

She points at Will’s jacket, and Beverly still doesn’t know if she has some idea of Beverly’s involvement with the case or the FBI. It doesn’t seem likely that she would know anything about Will apart from everything that got printed in the papers, but the fact that the date coincided with the dry cleaning may have been enough of a tip-off.

“Every one of us got a cross to bear; something we leave the rest of the world behind for.” She finally writes out Beverly’s receipt by hand; Beverly had forgotten she was waiting for it. “Usually it’s love. Sometimes it’s obsession and we call it love.”

Beverly thanks the woman and pushes the folded receipt into her pocket. Anything else the woman might have to say gets cut off by the bells over the door ringing. A tired-looking woman walks in; she ignores Beverly and gives her a ticket with the name Verger scrawled across the long side of the slip. They don’t so much as acknowledge Beverly’s presence after that, so she opts to see herself out and get back to Will at the motel.

She finds him standing outside with Bowman only. The latter leans comfortably on the hood of his car; the former has his hands splayed out across the black-painted metal, body angled forward as if in plank pose.

“Hey, Bev.”

She gets out of the car and waves once to Bowman before walking up to Will and handing off his jacket. He examines it with searching eyes, obviously pleased at the excellent job that’s been made of it.

“Thank you,” he says in a quiet voice.

“Will was just telling me how happy he was you found somebody to fix it up again,” Bowman supplies helpfully, in a gentle voice but with his usual upbeat clarity. “He said he didn’t want to be out in this snow without a proper defense against the elements.”

“That isn’t how I phrased it,” Will corrects him offhandedly, shrugging out of the threadbare coat the hospital attendants gave him.

Beverly notes Bowman’s smile as Will fits his arms back into his rightful jacket. It looks like him, creased and gently worn in a few places, though it isn’t old. Some aesthetic element to it is, though; it’s familiar the way Will is familiar, even when he was a perfect stranger. Bowman clears his throat.

“Yeah, you said something to that effect, I think; something about walking into snow drifts.”

“That was—” Will stops, gives Bowman a curious expression complete with a slight tilt of his head. “Oh, you’re teasing me.”

If he hadn’t said it with such a warm undertone, with so much awareness, Beverly might think to chide Bowman for joking around with him. The occasion does present them with a mood in much need of lightening; the tension needs some kind of outlet. Trust Bowman to relieve it with laughter. Beverly smiles and gestures with her arm to the long line of motel doors. It’s a question. Bowman picks up on it and nods.

“Hey, you think you want to head inside, man?”

Will rubs his arms through his jacket, fingers pressing into the sleeves with purpose. He says, “Sure.”

Instead of going up to the second level where Will is set up, Bowman walks them to his, located directly below Will’s. He’s talking the whole way there, explaining away Jimmy and Brian’s absences, Jack’s busywork at the station, a funny local cop who sent Will a Get-Well card while he was in the hospital, and more assorted odds and ends about hospital staff members and what they were up to now that the celebrity Will Graham was off their hands.

Beverly sees what he’s doing; he’s sly about it, but she sees. Will probably can tell Bowman’s angle, too, but neither of them try to stop him downplaying the gravity of what’s happened these last few days.

“Anyone want anything to drink?”

Bowman stands in the mouth of the small kitchen with his hands out. Beverly shakes her head. Will says no. Bowman gets himself a water bottle and plops down into a chair at the table near the window, fiddling with the curtains to let the light in. Beverly takes the seat opposite him when Will goes to sit on the bed. He bounces for a good long while with a serious look on his face. Bowman spares a glance to his behavior but for the most part looks unperturbed.

Once Will’s settled in, Bowman asks him, without really looking his way, “Bet it’s a relief to be out of that room, huh?”

The display makes more sense now: nervous energy. Of course Bowman understands it. Beverly had met Henry once or twice, Bowman’s rambunctious, excitable, fatigable nephew. Will drops his eyes, kicks off his shoes, and pulls his feet up onto the bed beneath his legs.

“I’ve caused the staff a great deal of trouble,” he mumbles.

“It was never you, Will,” Beverly retorts calmly. “It was always people trying to get their hooks in you from different angles.”

“Get their hooks in me,” he repeats, looking to Bowman for an explanation.

On cue Bowman supplies, “Stake some kind of claim on you that they don’t have any right to.”

Will swallows and looks away. He starts to say, “What if…”

Someone knocks on the door. All three of them turn to look.

Price and Zeller are standing outside when Bowman opens the door. Zeller stalks in straight away; Price lingers a bit, hesitant. Bowman beckons him to come in and closes the door after him. Beverly stands, reacting to the skyrocketing stress levels in the room.

To no one in general she inquires, “What’s going on?”

Price falls wearily into Bowman’s seat, and Zeller paces. Bowman keeps his calm for the most part, though he does fold his arms over his chest in unspoken consternation. Will doesn’t appear to be affected in the least by the kerfuffle, but Beverly can tell it’s not because it’s gone over his head.

His voice is patient and serene when he asks, “Zeller?”

Hearing his name jars him out of his silent contemplation. He just watches Will in something like confusion until the words come to him.

“Jack had us look at security footage from Interim LSU.”

Price sits up, awakening for his part in the conversation. “Within the time frame Saskia Ingram claims to have blacked out.”

Beginning to show some signs of impatience, though they’re subdued, Bowman asks, “Well?”

Zeller sighs.

“We noticed something kind of weird in the ER.” He looks at Price and shakes his head, running a hand through his hair. “There’s a moment where the tape sort of…skips?”

“ _Warps_ is more like it,” Price fills in.

Beverly only happens to look at Will over the course of their exchange, and there on his face is something like fear. Price and Zeller are mostly looking at each other and at Beverly and Bowman, so they miss Will’s expression. It’s there and gone in the blink of an eye. She can’t figure out how to ask what it was or why it was there. Bowman cuts into Price and Zeller’s account of the events with a question.

“So what are you thinking? Someone tampered with the recordings?”

“Not as far as we can tell,” Zeller says on a long exhale. “The whole thing’s really ominous and creepy.”

Price says, in his matter-of-fact voice, “Saskia Ingram sees to Gerard Bonfils at 1:47 AM, the cameras wig out, she makes a beeline for Will’s room—not according to schedule, by the way—stays for five minutes, less, and then heads back down to the ER.”

Zeller straightens up from where he had been leaning against the wall blocking off the kitchen from the rest of the room.

“This is where it gets really bizarre. Ingram’s in the room for ten seconds when a _different_ patient hops up and walks out.”

“On his severely sprained ankle,” Price adds.

Bowman frowns. “So what,” he laughs uncomfortably, “Body jumper?”

Zeller finally looks at Will. By extension, Price does, too.

“That’s possible, right? I mean…” He falters, makes a vague gesture with his hands. “Demons, or something.”

The room goes silent waiting on Will to reply to Zeller’s inquiry, but he doesn’t. He keeps his eyes on the floor and his hands clenched tightly around the blanket. Beverly only gives Will a few seconds to come out with it before posing a question of her own, one that Price and Zeller might actually be able to answer for themselves.

“Where’d the second patient go?”

Price names him, “Bähr.”

“Apparently he called an ambulance to come get him on Thalia and Dorgenois.” Zeller looks at Bowman and then at Beverly before adding, “When he got back to the hospital nurses said he claimed to have blacked out.”

“Well, where’d he go?” Bowman frowns. “What’s on Thalia and Dorgenois?”

“Nearest thing that makes sense is the Crescent Palms Motel,” Price says.

“Nothing but fake names on the books,” Zeller informs them. “We checked. Everybody pays in cash, and the establishment does not make use of security cameras.”

“Brilliant,” Bowman mumbles.

Beverly looks at Will again. The forlorn expression on his face has deepened with their talk. She prepares herself to ask the question, but his eyes find hers, and the look there is torn, ragged. The distinct plea for more time sits there, though his eyes alone convey little more than raw emotion.

“We should look at business establishments in the area,” Beverly says, turning away from Will and addressing the room. She’ll cede, for now, and give Will the time he needs. “Even if the motel is a blind spot, we can’t find nothing.”

Zeller nods. “Thought it’d be smart to check in with what we’ve got so far. We’ll have to be smart about our resources. Chief Blanchard doesn’t want any more trouble in his department. Bad enough Will got shot on his watch—and ours,” he revises guiltily, “but that detective Lounds talked to is looking at losing his job.”

“That’s not to mention Saskia Ingram,” Price sighs.

Bowman covers his face with his hands and scrubs down, tilting his head back. He grumbles, “What a cluster.”

Beverly pockets her hands and paces. “The general consensus is that a demon did this, then? Is that the direction we’re taking this?”

It’s obvious no one wants to tell her yes, but the answer is so obviously yes, there’s nothing for it. Price slouches and holds his head in his hands. When Zeller and Bowman remain silent, he murmurs, “We can’t even tell Saskia what happened to her.”

“She might understand.” Will surprises everyone by participating in the conversation at long last. “If you told her there’s a chance she could accept it, in time.”

Price gives him a look that’s almost heartbroken.

“She’s lived here ten years and she can’t get her head around conjure.”

Will replies, with incredible mercy Beverly almost can’t comprehend, “If left to choose between hell and madness, hell at least promises heaven.”

Price opens his mouth, but there’s nothing there; rather, there’s too much there to even begin to say. Will ducks his head.

“Knowing the truth…there’s no guarantee that it would heal the wounds that have been inflicted upon her.”

After a short, heavy silence, Price asks, “Has it healed yours?”

Will’s shoulders sink with the breath that escapes his lungs. He closes his eyes and grits his teeth. He says no.

The four of them watch Will, moving although sitting perfectly still. It happens like the flash of an exploding bulb, the room changing around them and plummeting into darkness that brightens gradually. They’re in Will’s room at Interim LSU. Saskia Ingram is standing at the foot of his bed, but her face is smoke, shadow, injury. It’s the blank milliseconds that precede a crash of thunder.

She’s moving closer, and her body isn’t her own. Beverly sees herself in the shivering dream, sees Jack asleep near the wall. There are words whispered that she can’t make out or interpret.

Out of the slow, slurring static she hears, _Ose lives._

The recreation starts to crumble, an alarmed sense of panic sifting into it and bleeding into Beverly’s conscious experience of this place. There’s an anachronistic spark of green and a deluge of warm water, cloying humidity, and blazing sunbeams. The world spins, the ground falls out, and all is sky.

Someone screams, in the shrieking, inhuman voice of an animal, _Akh!_

There’s fury interspersed with something like fear, but it’s apart from her, apart from Will. It’s noise and heat. It’s home, but the word is empty where it once was a cup brimming over.

Beverly’s knees lock, and her vision comes back. The violence fades from the room, and they’re back again.

“What did…”

Beverly blinks out of the stuporous haze and just catches herself from falling over. Bowman’s not so lucky, though Zeller manages to get hands under his arms before he can end up on the floor in a heap. Price is the only one lucky enough to have been sitting when it happened. Bowman, understandably, exclaims his confusion.

“What the hell was—”

“Will does it sometimes,” Zeller answers for Will, who looks helplessly bewildered and stricken.

“Wait, you…all of you saw it, too?”

“Yes.” Beverly comes to his side to steady him, and he accepts the assistance, though he looks ruffled. “We should have told you.”

“I didn’t…I’m sorry.” Will shakes his head, splaying his fingers over his scarlet-tinted forehead. “It was an accident.”

“What was an accident?” Zeller rounds Beverly and Bowman to stand in front of Will. “The part where you withheld information from us for _days_ or the part where you hacked our brains _again_?”

Jaw tight, Will answers with steel in his voice, “The latter.”

“Oh, but not the former. That’s _comforting_. You guys hear that? He withheld information on purpose.”

Will intones, scornfully, “What could I have told you that would have aided you in your investigation?”

“Oh, maybe that we were chasing smoke, Will— _anything_. You could have said anything, anything at all.”

“Brian,” Price chides him, reaching for his arm without standing up.

“No.” He gives Price a solid glance over his shoulder. “You’re not angry in the least that he let us worry about what happened with Saskia Ingram? It doesn’t bother you that he lied?”

“I didn’t lie,” Will protests mutedly from his unmoved position on the bed.

“I’m sorry,” Zeller chuckles humorlessly. “You missed your chance to tell me how you feel about this.”

Will watches him, gives back as much ire as he gets. He doesn’t look away, and neither does Zeller. Price stands finally and situates himself in between the two of them.

“Okay, Brian,” he says softly. “Let’s just go check out Hoffman Triangle like you wanted.”

Zeller’s shaking his head and muttering something under his breath, but he goes with Price and doesn’t say a word to anyone on his way out. Beverly sits next to Will on the bed. Bowman leans on the edge of the small table near the window.

“Why, Will?”

He licks his lips but doesn’t answer. Bowman rubs his hands together and waits. She rephrases her question.

“Were you trying to keep Ose out of it, or were you trying to keep us from seeing the one who used Saskia Ingram to visit you?”

A grimace flickers onto his mouth. After a moment he answers, “Both.”

“Will,” Beverly starts to say, but the prepared statement doesn’t follow the name. She sighs and looks down, rests her head in her hands.

Quietly he confesses, and his words have all the airs of a confession, “I didn’t want to involve you.”

“How do you think that would have gone over?” Bowman’s voice is gentle, the tone he’d use with a small child, maybe. “If you’re with us, we’re with you, Will. You can’t keep secrets from us, not if they intersect with a case. It’s…it’s obstruction.”

“You don’t have a claim on me,” he replies steadily, back straight and lip curling.

“Will, it’s…” All the color drains from Bowman’s face. He stammers, “That’s not what I’m saying.”

Beverly interrupts him, motioning toward him with her hand but not reaching far enough to touch him. She tells Will, “It’s not about claiming you; it’s about trusting you, Will. How can we trust you if you aren’t completely honest with us?”

She remembers what Jack said about Will lying about the pictures. What had he told her Will said to him?

_Sometimes I lie when the promise of escape looms overhead._

_If left to choose between hell and madness, hell at least promises heaven._

“What’s it going to be?”

It doesn’t feel right strong arming Will into telling them the truth, but they have to be able to count on Will to have their backs and keep them informed when he’s able. She can’t help feeling that Zeller was too hard on him, but he was angry, and she can’t help, either, that she understands why.

Will sighs, drops his head forward. Beverly thinks he’ll make them wait again, but he doesn’t.

“Where humans are concerned, I’ll tell you what I see and nothing more.”

It’s a compromise, she realizes. Jack wouldn’t like it, probably. Zeller might hate it. She doesn’t think they have a choice, but really, Will doesn’t either.

Reading her mind, he says, “I’d stay here if I could.”

Implying nothing outside of his own bald curiosity, Lloyd asks him, “Can’t you?”

“I suppose if it came to that, I could.”

Beverly tilts her head questioningly. “You don’t want to?”

“Jack has use for me, a purpose.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to do what he says,” Lloyd tells him, tapping into that mercy Will showed to Price earlier. “You could get away from all of this; we could part ways here and now, and you could have your own life doing your own thing.”

“Maybe someday,” Will allows, something _further_ resting unsaid on his tongue.

Beverly studies him in his obstinacy and waits through the noisy car backfiring in the parking lot and through the ticking of the clock on the wall. 

“I’ll only ask once, Will, and then I’ll never bring it up again.” He gives her his full attention, anticipating her words. “What do you mean to do when you find him?”

He frowns, and the action makes him look so much older, though something about his eyes is infinitely young. For all that he’s seen, his eyes haven’t dulled to the newness of this time or of the struggle that has already made itself apparent in his relationship with them. For however much pain he’s experienced, he knows that good exists along with the bad and that light extinguishes darkness, not the other way around.

“We’re going to have a conversation,” Will says, utterly aloof. “I suspect…” he adds, faltering and then bolstering his resolve. “One of us will be killed.”

Beverly doesn’t want to believe that outcome, but it’s the only one she can support given the circumstances. She looks up at Lloyd, and she can see he is conflicted, too. Will meets his eyes and whispers, “Toxicity.”

Bowman’s lips part and his eyes go wide, but he doesn’t say anything. He just drops his eyes and sets his hands on either side of him to hold onto the edge of the table. A decision has been made somewhere in the spaces in between Will’s words and Bowman’s reaction. Beverly doesn’t remark on it. She can’t. Bowman can’t either. The three of them sit together, not looking at each other or at any one thing. Beverly’s phone buzzes in her jacket pocket. Bowman’s goes off in the next instant. Will makes a face like someone just spat in his coffee. Beverly’s decided by now that that’s just the face he makes when he’s confused.

She reads off the text as Bowman opens his.

“Chilton?”

Bowman’s face does something similar to Will’s. “That guy with the asylum?”

“Mental hospital,” Beverly corrects distractedly.

Flatly Bowman says, “For the criminally insane. What’s this guy’s business in NOLA, do you think?”

Beverly considers for a few seconds before turning on Will. All he says is, “I’m not actually omniscient.”

She rolls her eyes at his non-answer and stands from the bed. To Bowman she asks, “Are you coming?”

“I think I’ll head to the station; see if Jack can’t use some help.”

“Will?”

He looks surprised that she calls on him.

“What?”

“Come with me.”

“You…Why?”

“My dad always taught me not to dwell on mistakes,” she says, nudging his shoes where they’ve been discarded on the floor. “Put your shoes on, and let’s go.”

He swallows and leans forward to do just that. Bowman’s shrugging into his jacket and Beverly is tucking her phone and wallet back into her pockets when Will stands and shuffles awkwardly on his feet.

“I’m sorry.”

Beverly can see he means it, so she nods. Bowman accepts his apology easily, but something about his demeanor is decidedly rigid and closed off. Will notices and turns to him.

“You’ve never tried to get your hooks in me.”

Bowman’s face looks distinctly rosy, a red blush filling into his dark olive cheeks.

“No,” he agrees in that effortless, wholehearted way of his.

Will doesn’t smile, but he looks lighter for the exchange. “I shouldn’t have suggested that you did.”

Bowman doesn’t say anything at first, but he nods after a moment. He looks at Will and then at Beverly.

“Zeller might need more than that.”

Will confirms, heading for the door, “Zeller _will_.”

In spite of herself Beverly smiles. She shakes her head and files out of the room after Will with Bowman on her heels. She keeps her eyes trained on Will’s jacket, the effects of his shooting erased from it completely. The only evidence left is etched into her mind, burned into her retinas.

_Every one of us got a cross to bear; something we leave the rest of the world behind for._

Will had taken his up and chosen to follow them: Jack, Zeller, Price, Bowman, and Beverly. She can’t know if it’s the right thing to do. She can’t say whether he’s damned himself willingly or whether he’s right to hold onto death for a calling. Just because it’s all he knows, it doesn’t mean it won’t chew him up and spit him out on this even ground, the arena that is their real, modern, brutal world of flesh and blood.

Her eyes jump up to hers when they get to the car, and she shocks back into the screeching present. The cars creep past and the birds sing.

_It goes deeper than their blood._

He looks straight up at the gray sky overhead. Snow begins to fall.


	3. Sea of Heartbreak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alana checks in with Chilton at Jack’s request.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Lost love and loneliness / Memories of your caress / So divine how I wish / You were mine again my dear_

Jack calls in the morning with a request. He wants her to visit Chilton at the earliest opportunity and report back if there’s anything markedly odd or uncharacteristic about his behavior. When she asks why he skimps on the bigger details, only emphasizing that time is of the essence.

“Let him know I sent you to see him.”

“Well, don’t sound so ominous, Jack. Tell me what’s going on.”

“We’re following a lead.”

“What, and it pointed you at Chilton? You can’t be serious.” She doesn’t buy it. She doesn’t think she’s supposed to. “You can’t be, or you’d be sending officers to take him into custody.”

“We don’t have enough to take him into custody. The question isn’t whether he did it but whether he played a conscious part in it.”

“What do you mean, a _conscious_ part? You think he could have memory loss?”

“Saskia Ingram reported memory loss. So did two other parties involved, that we can find.”

“I’ll go, but I’m still not sure what it is you want me to look for.”

He faxes a hefty stack of papers directly to her office for her to take and show to Chilton and reiterates what he said before: “Make sure he knows _I_ know you’re with him.”

“All right,” she concedes, leafing through the pages and stopping when she finds a scanned photo of Will among them. “Why did you include Will’s picture?”

“I need to know if he reacts when he sees it. It’s imperative that you see him today. Give him as little warning as possible.”

She bites her lip and sets the faxed copies of the case file on her desk. “It’ll have to be this evening then. It’s short notice for both of us; it’ll have to work.”

“That’s the best I can hope for.”

There’s a brief pause as she’s sorting through the sheaves and people shuffle in Jack’s background. She says, “You think there’s a supernatural explanation to all this, don’t you?”

“That’s the idea,” he grumbles.

Issues with time and weather bar Jack from tagging along like he wants to, but he says he’ll be in after the weekend to meet with Chilton. He _would_ do it himself, but it can’t wait.

Alana nods. He’s done surprisingly well with the changes that have fallen into his life recently. She reassures him she’ll take care of it and promptly calls Chilton once they’re done on the phone to fit something in before the end of the day. He sounds confused to hear from her but oddly resigned to it. He agrees, after some haggling, to meet with her late in the evening, and though he gives off an unsuspecting kind of vibe she maintains her distrust of him. Jack told her genuine innocence could implicate Chilton more than he’d had any way of even knowing.

The trick would be gauging whether he knew what he was concealing or not. 

She staples the papers together and binds them in a folder before tidying up for her next patient and soldiering through the day, counseling and listening where she’s needed. She refills a prescription for Eskalith, talks a separate patient down from the brink of an anxiety attack, and makes notes when her newest patient finally opens up about her mother’s attempt on her life late in childhood.

It’s a day like any other. She forgets all about Chilton until her last patient leaves and Jack’s hodgepodge case file is still in her drawer staring up at her from beneath her car keys. Work provided a decent enough distraction, but the time has come now to go.

The drive to the hospital, Alana refuses to say the name in its entirety, is quiet. The sun has only just set, so there’s a gloomy, dusty look to everything. Deep indigo ribbons streak just above the horizon and thicker shadows of pitch-black fill the space below it. It begins to snow five minutes out from the building.

A young man at the receptionist’s desk buzzes her through to Chilton’s office without a word, only offering a leer of a smile as he goes back to watching live video feeds. She walks alone down the corridor with the manila folder tucked securely under one arm.

Chilton greets her at the door.

“Dr. Bloom.”

There’s a funny curviness to his voice as if a question wants to be asked somewhere within it. He looks normal, if a little tired. She steps inside when he sweeps his arm behind him for her to enter.

As he’s closing the door he asks, very casually, “And what have I done to offend you lately, doctor?”

“It’s nothing you’ve done to me, Chilton,” she says coolly, turning and holding the folder out to him without preamble and really, without tact. “I want to know if you remember offending Will Graham.”

“If I remember,” he repeats blandly, barely looking at the file, fixed on her face as he is. “And why do you think I wouldn’t?”

“It’s a question of whether you’ll tell me,” she replies, calculated. “With people there’s always a question.”

“Yes, but _yours_ was very specific.”

His eyes shine in the darkly lit office. His eyes drop suspiciously to the documents hovering between them. A strange vulnerable expression flickers across his face, and he crosses slowly to where she is. He swallows once, gives her a carefully blank look as he reaches for it, and snatches the papers out of her hands. The set of his shoulders is rigid still; he’s holding himself back, restraining some dire need he doesn’t trust her enough to let her see.

His eyes track deliberately down every page, hands turning too quickly to allow an illusion of distance from what they show him. It’s greedy. She can’t pin why. Calm shudders over him, and then he’s folding the stapled pages back and turning it so that she can see. The emotion has left his face, but he’s still frantic with some kind of curiosity she can’t place.

“This is Will Graham?” 

His fingers draped over the top of the page just obscure the top of a photo Jack must have taken of Will especially for the occasion. She checks Chilton’s eyes and nods, a sinking feeling settling into her stomach when she sees the clarity that blossoms across his expression at the confirmation. He definitely recognizes Will, though he tells her in the next instant that he doesn’t.

“Can’t say I have any recollection of meeting with this man ever before in my life,” he lies easily through his teeth, folding the papers back to normal and casually flipping through the remaining pages. He hums and says, “But I can see why you’d suspect me. After all I often travel to random parts of the country and stay in cheap motel rooms just for kicks. It does get so tedious managing an entire hospital after all.”

“There’s surveillance footage of you in the area at the same time that an unauthorized visitor went to see Will Graham in the hospital.”

Chilton looks at her for a few seconds, an uncanny kind of openness evident in the soft lines around his mouth and his slightly widened eyes. Measuredly he asks, “Did the hospital’s cameras capture my image?”

In the few beats before she can tell him no, understanding dawns on him. It alters his entire demeanor, emboldens him to stride confidently over to his desk with the file in hand. He sits in the grand fashion of a king and calmly lays the folder out before him. She swallows her comment and sits opposite him, aware of the angles Jack told her she could play.

_See if he reacts to Will’s picture._

Check.

_Ascertain whether he remembers going._

He does but not in a helpful way. Jack told her that might happen.

“Dr. Chilton, what do you remember about going to New Orleans?”

He chuckles and drawls, “There you go again, suggesting I can’t access the memories.”

Levelly she asks him, “Can you?”

His lip twitches, the knee-jerk reaction closer to a grimace than a smile. He withdraws his hand from the file, closes it, and straightens out in his seat. Once his posture’s corrected he laces his hands together on top of the closed file.

“I don’t suppose you’d leave this with me.”

“No.”

He nods, jaw tight and shoulders bunched up. Gently but with his typical twist of snide charisma underlying the softness, “Why are you so concerned with my mental condition?”

“I’m concerned about Will Graham.”

He smiles, brilliant, beaming leaps in both corners of his mouth. It’s just a flutter of an emotion, there and then gone before she can react to it. He pinches one flap of the folder and throws it open to the page with Will’s photo held in place with a paperclip.

“Well, no wonder,” he muses, lecherously amused. “He is a specimen.”

Alana smiles, and it’s the least of ways that she can hurt him, so she makes it a warm one.

“Is that why you went to Louisiana? So you could see him up close?”

He laughs, a startled, entertained sound. He says, smirking, “Dr. Bloom, do you expect me to believe you or Jack Crawford have grounds to investigate me?”

“No one’s investigating you, Chilton,” she says lightly. “We’re just having a conversation.”

“Then Jack Crawford didn’t send you these for the purpose of strong-arming me in a private interrogation.” A slow smile stretches across his face. He rubs his fingers into his chin, smile widening still. “It’s sloppy, Dr. Bloom, if you don’t mind my saying so. I’m flattered,” he adds quickly. “But really, what was so important that Jack Crawford couldn’t wait to get his hands on what’s stored up in my brain?”

It’s funny the way he phrases it, but funny isn’t the right word. The way he says it is _coded_.

She leans forward in her seat and assesses the folder, upside down from her point of view.

“You tell me.”

“Oh, would that I could, Dr. Bloom,” he coos, and something about the faint chord of despondency in his voice rings honest to her ears. “After all, the word on the proverbial street is that you’ve got plans to assign this man to a psychiatrist here in Baltimore. Why would I do something so untoward to a prospective patient?”

She doesn’t laugh, though his intention is clearly for her to react. When she gives him nothing he frowns and averts his eyes, fingers drumming idly on the files. He sits back in his chair, leaning to one side so that his shoulder presses against the back. He makes a decision in his silent perusal of the incident report Saskia Ingram filed at Jack’s request. Chilton presses his lips together and sighs.

“I’ve got nothing more to say on the matter. I don’t appreciate half-spoken accusations being made against me in my place of work.”

“There’s something else,” she baits him, waiting for curiosity to spark in his eyes before she continues. “Jack sent me here as a courtesy. As soon as he gets in from Louisiana he’ll be here to speak to you himself.” When his expression doesn’t change she adds, “With Will Graham.”

That does it. Something twists, just for a second, less than that, even.

“Oh?” He smirks, but it’s weak. There’s no bite to it where she thinks there usually is. “You decided to refer him to me after all.”

He doesn’t believe it, isn’t even really making a joke. They’re just words coming out of his mouth. No weight to them, no consideration they may be true.

“I am curious who it was that told you I was shopping for psychiatrists.”

“I’m appalled you think I kiss and tell for nothing, Dr. Bloom,” he remarks evenly, eyes flashing mischievously. “Almost as appalled as I am at your complete lack of faith in my basic cognitive skills. It’s insulting, really.”

“Do you still let the insults get to you, Chilton, after all these years?”

Chilton opens his mouth to deny it but staggers to a juddering halt. He interrupts himself to look sharply over his shoulder, fingers unclasping and grabbing onto the edge of the desk. The grooved hills of his knuckles turn red in between the bones seconds before the stain of blood beneath his skin edges into white. He half-breathes a single syllable, an incoherent question.

For a few stalled moments he’s still, staring off at something that isn’t there, or if it is it’s something only he can see. He mumbles something under his breath and the words jumble together. She just makes out, “Puppet…see…”

“Frederick?”

He whips around to face front again, eyes unfocused when they find hers. They clear with some difficulty, and he sits up taller in his chair, raising his chin as he does. He runs one hand down the front of his tie, smoothing it down as if to regain control that way. It’s too murky to interpret at face value, but she can identify it for the loss of control that it is.

Cautious, she asks, “Are you all right?”

“She’ll be gone soon,” he mutters, dropping his gaze and rubbing at the spot between his eyebrows.

When she moves her chair back to stand he tracks her movement with his eyes and promptly squeezes them shut around a wince.

Softly as she’s rounding his desk she asks, “Have you been having trouble with migraines?”

“I’ve been having trouble with the general state of my existence,” he slurs through gritted teeth.

“I think you know I want you to clarify what you mean.” 

He doesn’t say anything, so she rephrases.

“Tell me what you remember.”

He shakes his head, cracking an eye open to look at her, though he doesn’t raise his eyes higher than her waist. The cantankerous shift in his attitude with the onset of a migraine is almost comical, though she feels some modicum of sympathy for him, for whatever it is he’s struggling against.

“That’s a frightfully short list, doctor.”

“Tell me what you don’t remember then.”

He snorts and takes up the file, waving it in her general direction, and hisses, “That.”

“You don’t remember _anything_ from Louisiana.”

Chilton huffs a sigh, a swear word tripping off the tail end of it that doesn’t offend her so much as it makes her grimace for him. Maybe she doesn’t condone his methods and maybe she isn’t fond of him as a person, but a suffering human being is a suffering human being, isn’t he; even if it is Chilton.

She takes up her chair and walks it around the side of his desk to place it beside his.

“Does it feel worse when you look up?”

“Oh, yes,” he bites out, laughing. “Everything’s worse when I look up.”

She frowns. “Tell me about Louisiana, Chilton.”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know, can I?” He throws his hands, agitated. “I came home feeling like I’d been drugged and thrown down a laundry chute with a plane ticket in my pocket that,” he chuckles, adding an exaggerated shrug for emphasis, “that I have no recollection of purchasing.”

He looks at her, aided now by the fact of her proximity and that he doesn’t have to raise his sightline beyond his established comfort level. Clarity spills back into him in draughts, and he clams up straight away, unsurprisingly.

“You’ll have a hell of a time proving I had anything to do with Will Graham’s ordeal if the hospital’s security footage exonerates me.”

Alana sits back in her chair, studying him and forcing herself not to be displeased. She nods once, takes up the files, and rises to leave. He makes no move to stop her, and whether it’s fatigue that’s stopping him or plain disinterest she can’t say.

“Do tell Jack Crawford I look forward to meeting with him,” he says, words sliding together. “And Will Graham, him especially.”

She stops where she is and tucks the folder under her arm again.

“See a doctor, Chilton. You may have trochleitis. If that’s the case a corticosteroid injection should fix you up.”

They watch each other in a silence absolutely burdened with things unspoken, questions unasked and unanswered. There’s a ripple of something heavy and uncertain that overtakes his features, something that strikes through the mask of overconfidence and slimy charm. Like clouds parting to reveal sunlight, the disturbance exposes the deep mar of his frown.

“And if it’s not the case,” he says quietly, beaten in posture and in tone.

“If it’s not I would still recommend a doctor,” she murmurs, clutching the edges of the file in her fingers.

If there had existed a single doubt in her mind about whether the move made on Will in the hospital had anything to do with his divine origins it doesn’t anymore. But it’s there and she can see it, perfectly evident in Chilton’s face.

He’s scared of it, and it’s that fear that tells her he knows something has happened to him even if he can’t or won’t put words to it. If all of it points at and because of Will, she’s even more terrified for him and what will be coming.

“Well, no shortage of those in my life,” he sighs, feigning indifference and getting to his feet to see her to the door when she makes no move to see herself out. Without a shred of optimism in his tone he says, “Logistically, everything should go off without a hitch.”

Will’s already been shot, she corrects him in her head, recalling his true name beneath the flow of her thoughts going into overdrive. Too much has gone wrong already. But she goes when he opens the door for her, and she drives home with the folder resting unthreateningly on the passenger’s seat and the radio off. The night is cold and dark, and there’s snow on the ground. Maryland is an hour ahead of Louisiana so she calls Jack to deliver her findings once she’s safe and sound in her kitchen.

“Was there anything off about him?”

“At the end he got hit with a pretty bad migraine. Just before that he was muttering to himself.”

A bit farther from the phone she hears Will ask, “What did he say?”

There’s some shuffling. Jack puts her on speaker.

“He said something about a puppet and that _she_ would be gone soon. Does that sound familiar?”

“If he’s going on like that she’s already left him. She wouldn’t let him speak if she hadn’t vacated his body.”

“I’m sorry, if…” Alana clears her throat and uncorks a bottle of Domaine de Chevalier. “If she hadn’t _vacated his body_? Jack?”

“Will said he told you about demons during your visit.”

“He did,” she confirms for him, hesitant to hear the rest of what he has to say. “Are you saying you think Chilton was possessed and that’s why he can’t remember going to Louisiana?”

Jack hums. “He can’t even remember making the trip?”

“All he said was he came back home and that was all.”

“Did he say what happened upon his arrival?” There’s shuffling and Will’s voice moves closer to the phone. He says, “If anyone picked him up?”

“I didn’t think to ask,” she admits, feeling distinctly empty-handed now. “You can ask him that yourself when you get in.” A brief silence stutters over the connection. Alana imagines Will giving Jack a look, asking without words if he’ll be permitted to go along. To Jack she says, “I may have told him you were taking Will with you.”

“Well, that was very thoughtful of you, Dr. Bloom,” he says flatly.

She sips the wine she’s poured into a glass, a minute shrug lifting her shoulders. “He recognized Will from his photograph.”

There’s another pause.

“All right, but we need ground rules,” Jack warns, words directed at Will and not at Alana. He says something else that’s cut off by a door opening and shutting. Farther from the receiver Jack’s voice floats to her ears: “Bowman?”

The phone shuffles and then the noise deadens as she’s taken off speaker.

“What was his reaction to the picture?”

“He looked desperate, like he recognized you.”

“And you’re certain he said _she_ would be gone soon?”

“Definitely.”

“You didn’t catch a name?”

“He might have said one, but I didn’t hear it if he did. I don’t think he realized he was actually saying anything.”

Will hums. “It’s not rare, but that strong of an aftereffect doesn’t happen very often.”

Alana waits, but Will stays silent. She hears Bowman saying in the background, “ _…pretty upset about it, but I guess Will’s doctor agreed to write her one hell of a recommendation. I don’t think she wanted to stay here after everything that happened anyway_.”

“Is there something specific that usually sets it off?”

“From what I know of it the Arad phase arises more in certain temperaments. Sometimes it’s intentional on the part of the possessor, but every so often, there’s something higher than all of it pulling the strings.”

A shiver creeps up on her, bringing with it an echo of Chilton’s half-realized utterances: _Puppet…see…_

“Who would that be then?”

“The typical response I get for answering questions like that is disbelief and amusement.”

“You’re not going to get either of those things from me where the topic demon possession is concerned,” she promises solemnly.

He does laugh, though, and the sound of it makes her feel lighter. He says, “Sometimes it’s God; sometimes it’s other angels, other demons. Everyone’s got their fingers in everyone else’s pies.”

“Not very sanitary, is it, the possession industry.”

“Oh, business is booming,” he remarks coolly. “It’s always been a favorite of their kind. They don’t get physical forms like we do, not ones that could pass in this realm. Those among them who can disguise themselves the best are like celebrities.”

_The very good ones can get by fooling us with their false skins, but usually they don’t have the self-control for it. Ose could fool the best of us._

“You mentioned before that Ose had a gift for disguise.”

He takes a moment and then in a soft voice says, “Yes, he did.”

Jack and Bowman are still talking just outside of what would be an easy hearing range. She hears Jack say, “ _…got all that we need from her report. Take Price. She’ll prefer to hear it from him._ ”

She asks Will as the other voices in the room drift farther away, “Will you come with Jack to see him?”

“I wouldn’t make a liar out of you, Dr. Bloom,” he murmurs.

She smiles at the traces of an accent hugging his words, at the playful tease lodged in the supple slant around _liar_.

“You’re starting to sound like a Southerner. Sure you don’t want to stay in Louisiana after all?”

“There’s nothing here for me,” he says, his quiet voice drowning out Jack’s conversation moving into another part of the room and leaving them swathed in silence. “Jack wants our arrangement to continue; that’s something.”

“It is. That’s a pretty great something.” She sets her wine glass down and leans on the counter, mind still on Chilton and how he’d called Will a prospective patient. “You know Jack asked me to find a psychiatrist for you in the event that you decided to stay on with him.”

“Yes,” Will says, not quite indifferent but perhaps resigned. “I hope you weren’t thinking of giving me to Chilton.”

“No, he wasn’t my first choice.”

“But you _have_ a first choice.”

“I have a few,” she hedges. “I thought maybe you could meet with a few of them first, decide who you like and choose based on that.”

“Sounds reasonable enough,” he agrees, shuffling a bit before getting settled again. “What are their names?”

She’d narrowed it down to three over the course of the week, though that had been mostly out of respect for possible bias she may have taken with her in tackling the task at hand. It would be better to let Will have his pick rather than go with her best personal recommendation. The three on her list had already been consulted with the possibility of meeting a potential patient under Jack’s care, so she has no qualms with telling Will now.

“There are three: Jeffrey Pearce,” she names off the first and pauses so Will can interject or write the name down if he wants. The last two names follow: “Swarna Misra and Hannibal Lecter.”

Something static rustles over their connection, the noise accompanied next by silence.

“Will?”

The static rustles again. Will clears his throat a ways from the phone. She surmises he must have dropped the phone. A tremble enters his voice when he repeats the name, “Hannibal Lecter?”

“Yes,” she confirms for him, confusion flooding her brain. Beverly Katz told her he’d explicated the entire origin story of her name and that he could do it with most anyone that walked into the room. It’s still uneasy, the feeling she gets. “Do you know of him?”

“I…all three of them, yes, it’s just…I didn’t realize…”

If there’s something horrific in Hannibal’s past Alana doesn’t know what it could be to inspire such a reaction from Will. She starts to ask but he continues before she can put the words together: “Dr. Pearce won’t be a good fit. I understand why he was under consideration, but Dr. Misra will be better.”

“Oh,” she breathes, bewildered. “Right, I’ll let her know so she can schedule something for when you get back.”

After a sharp silence, he says, “Thank you, Dr. Bloom.”

“Of course.”

“Good night.”

“Good night, Will.”

Jack takes the phone back a few moments later, unbothered or unaware of Will’s behavior, absent as he’d been when she dropped Hannibal’s name. He uses the added time to thank her for her help and says he’ll see her when he’s back in town Monday or Tuesday. Once they’re disconnected she walks numbly to her laptop in the study and opens three emails, one to Pearce, one to Swarna, and one to Hannibal.

The first two only vary in terms of the negation in Pearce’s email. Hannibal’s message is less formal, more personal, but it contains the same type of information, nothing more or less than he needs to know.

On some level she supposes it’s a good thing Will doesn’t want to drag Hannibal into his world of violence and mind-bending impossibility. It’s selfish that she wanted Hannibal to be his psychiatrist; it’s more selfish that she’s glad he chose someone else.

Alana works at the laptop a while longer instead of going to bed, still too disconcerted to rest. There are questions she has that she can’t ask, especially if Hannibal isn’t going to be Will’s psychiatrist after all. He won’t have full disclosure; he won’t understand how Will could possibly know him from his name alone. Hell, if he asks why he wasn’t chosen, which she doesn’t believe he will, she couldn’t give him the real answer.

_Will heard your name and I lost him._

It strikes her then how similar his reaction to Hannibal’s name was to Chilton’s when he saw Will’s picture in the file. She couldn’t know what expression befell Will upon hearing it, but the same kind of awe crept into Chilton’s voice that she detected in Will’s.

_He looked desperate, like he recognized you._

The question is why, and there’s no solid way to even touch it. Hannibal emails her back just as she’s fixing to log off. Weariness sets in and she muses aloud, “Speak of the devil.”

 

_I’m very sorry to hear it. He sounded like quite an interesting character. Thank you for your consideration all the same, Alana. I hope his chosen candidate will make great strides with him in therapy._

_—H._

 

She’d forgotten that she’d told Hannibal of Will’s probable delusions about being an angel. It had become so real and concrete to her in the time she’d had alone with the concept that any other explanation had started to go soft in the middle and flimsy around the edges. She writes back with something to the point and congenial, and she doesn’t mention Will’s _chosen candidate_.

Neither Pearce nor Swarna have sent word yet, so she turns the laptop off and calls it a night.

Before she settles in for bed she sends Jack a text.

_I’d like to be there when you go see Chilton again, if that’s all right._

He answers back in no time at all: _**No objections here.**_

For a while she lies in bed with the cell phone in her hands and the text open.

_What’s her name? The one you think got Chilton?_

_**Barbas.** _

The name stares back at her for a time, empty and unfamiliar. She closes out of the thread and types it into the search bar on her phone. The online encyclopedia she accesses links to something called the _Ars Goetia_. Some accounts she goes through — and she goes through a few — never mention Barbas, but all of them name Ose.

_Ose…his name was Ose._

She even locates a PDF of _The Lesser Key of Solomon_ , which ranks him as a president of hell, fifty-seventh out of a legion of seventy two “chief spirits”. He alters a person’s perception of the truth and basically renders the target mad for all intents and purposes. He’s seen first as a leopard and then as a man. The very little she can find about Barbas is that _she_ , or maybe gender modifies don’t apply in this situation, is depicted by a lion.

Ose and Barbas minister to similar things: they teach on what can’t otherwise be discovered, fabricate reality from fiction, and heal through obscure, potentially harmful methods. There’s nothing to suggest anywhere that they travel together and no hint of an allegiance between them and any other _spirit_ in what she can unearth from the demonological archives available to her online.

There’s nothing about angels and demons mixing either, though she’s certain there are troves of unwritten histories tucked away in Will’s memory, tucked away in the memory of the fallen angel, _Mal’ak ha-mashḥit._

It’s late when her battery depletes most of the way and she’ll be tired in the morning, but the weekend is right around the corner. When Jack comes back with Will there will be another opportunity for her to get the answers she wants. Until then it’ll be a game of deciding which battles to fight and which ones to let go.

There’s already the matter of her professional curiosity with which to contend. She’d tried to do away with it when she made the decision upon returning home from Louisiana to leave her clinical interest in him behind. Her reasons were jumbled, of course, but the general idea was that she’d prefer to be Will’s friend rather than his doctor. Hopefully she hadn’t made too grave an error surrendering him for a patient.

Maybe it’s too much to hope that she can better help him outside of a relationship with official rules and boundaries guiding them.

_Well, no wonder. He is a specimen._

She tells herself that’s not the reason, sets her phone to charge, and turns onto her side to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From Bryan Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (S2 E7, _Yakimono_ ): “Those are just words coming out of your mouth. No weight to them, no consideration they may be true.”
> 
> Domaine de Chevalier, 2009  
> http://www.wine.com/v6/Domaine-de-Chevalier-2009/wine/111744/Detail.aspx
> 
> From _Hannibal_ (S1 E8, _Fromage_ ): “I feel like I’ve dragged you into my world.”
> 
>  _Arad_ is an emesal word that means “slave”  
>  http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/epsd/emesal.html


	4. Remember Me (I’m the One Who Loves You)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack brings Will to Quantico.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _And through all kinds of weather / You’ll find, I’ll never change / Through the sunshine and the shadows / I’ll always be the same / We’re together right or wrong / Where you go I’ll tag along / Remember me, I’m the one who loves you_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  
> A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,  
> Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it  
> Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
> 
> The darkness drops again but now I know  
> That twenty centuries of stony sleep  
> Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,  
> And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  
> Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
> 
> —William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Something like twenty years,” Jack says, pointing to the gas nozzle when he depresses the trigger and locks it in place. “You don’t want to press that until it’s in right.”

“I can’t drive, Jack,” Will reminds him.

“You’ll learn. You should learn anyhow. Beverly will teach you.”

Will doesn’t say anything, just watches the numbers tick up and up on the display screen. When the nozzle clicks he jiggles it a bit, places it back in its station, and waits for his receipt. Jack holds it out when Will points at it.

“That reminds you of where you’ve been.”

Jack elaborates, “It’s a public record of where I’ve been.”

“So the rest of the FBI could find this receipt and know that you came here?”

“Surveillance footage,” Jack counters, nodding at the camera strategically placed over the entrance to the gas station. “We look at the cameras to see if people have been where they say they weren’t, and they give us receipts to show that they _did_ go where they say they went. Get it?”

Will licks his lips and rounds the front of the car. He takes shotgun. It’s only him and Jack in the car.

“Ripples in a pond,” Will asserts upon sliding into his seat.

Jack waits for him to close his door before starting the car.

“It all has to go back to something; there’s always a source, a root to grow the tree.”

Solemnly Will says, “A cell to divide.”

Jack looks at him, perplexed, but Will doesn’t seem to notice that he’s said anything strange. Elucidation doesn’t look forthcoming, so Jack doesn’t press him. He just turns the key and drives. Will’s going to Jack’s for dinner with Bella, and then he’ll be staying with Bowman until further notice. Godsend that he is, Bowman made it perfectly clear that his offer wouldn’t expire any time soon.

Failing that, Beverly promised she wouldn’t mind having Will around for a roommate for however long he needed a roof over his head. Jack picked Bowman at all because of his farm, but to be fair, the man does have a special way of interacting with Will. It’s different from Beverly’s in a very marked way that Jack can’t define just yet.

As for right now, they’re about thirty minutes out from the house, the sun is on its way to setting, and he’s gearing down for a very complicated evening in with his wife and former angel of the Lord, nouveau consultant. He’d told her about half of the full truth to the matter. It was all he could manage over the phone, based solely on Alana Bloom’s reaction to Will’s situation, to his _origins_.

He’d decided very early on that he was going to be honest about their predicament in case they ever found themselves in a situation where she needed to know what sorts of beings existed in the world. Jack never wants it to come to that, but hoping and wishing is not a defense. Preparation is a defense, and damn it, he’ll keep his wife safe through this. There’s still an ominous, lurking thing hanging over it all, something he’s felt since the night Will first came to them, _ḫa-lam Supad_ , he’d called it.

_First I thought you were going to take my head. That’s the custom among them._

_Well, we aren’t them. We’ve got you. You’re with us._

Will’s with them, which means the darkness that’s after him is with them, too. It’s haunting them, a presence lying in wait, poised and eager in the shadows like the demons he thought they were, waiting to take his life in the wake of his fall.

“How will you demonstrate that I’m what you’ll tell her I am?”

Jack takes his eyes off the road for a second to look at Will. He says, “Bella’s smart. She knows when I’m lying and when I’m telling the truth.”

“Will that be enough?”

The look on Will’s face is open, completely naked. It’s enough to make Jack feel embarrassed, in a small way. His vulnerability is a tangible thing, hangs between them like mist. He’ll have to warn him against showing people so much in the future; it’s a quick way to get hurt in this world. Jack’s sure Will knows it already, but their experience together thus far hasn’t proven that he’ll let it guide his behavior.

“I already told her what you are. She’ll believe you if she doesn’t believe me.”

“That seems highly unlikely,” Will murmurs, turning to look out the window. “Before anyone believes me the general consensus is that I must be crazy.”

“I know you aren’t,” Jack tells him. He means it, though he doesn’t take his eyes away from the road and Will doesn’t turn from the window. “She knows we believe you; she just doesn’t know what all that entails.”

“Shouldn’t be too difficult then.”

“Was that sarcasm?”

Will sighs, not seeing—or maybe he does see—Jack’s smile.

“It’s becoming less and less a part of who I am: what I was before, what I’ve done.”

Jack swallows, changes lanes. Will is slouched in his seat when he looks over, his face still turned toward the window.

“You should sit up straight,” Jack chides him, clearing his throat once the words are out. “You’ll end up with a hunchback sitting like that.”

Will huffs a laugh, straightening out a moment later.

“Why don’t you have children?”

It’s a personal question, of course, but there doesn’t seem to be a huge difference between intimate information and that which pertains to business for Will. Besides, Jack doesn’t really have a problem telling him. His answer by now is rote.

“Work’s always kept us both pretty busy.”

“But you want kids?”

“We used to talk about it a lot when we were younger.”

“What happened?”

Jack chuckles mirthlessly, thinking about time and how it flies. He says, “Life did.”

“Has a funny way of doing that, doesn’t it,” his passenger murmurs, swiveling to face front again.

He has a blank, tired look on his face, and if Jack didn’t know any better he’d think he was inviting silence to their conversation. Maybe Jack does know better, but turnabout is fair play, especially if Will wants to ask personal questions.

“How did it happen, if you don’t mind my asking?”

And a short silence does follow his question but not the kind that suggests Will did actually want silence after all. It’s pregnant; it creates new questions he hadn’t thought to ask: _Was it real? Do you still feel the same way? How is this Barbas person going to use it against you? What will you do when you have to choose? Why didn’t you kill him the first time if that was your job?_

Too late, Jack observes the shift in the silence, can physically notice Will taking these questions into himself as they flutter through Jack’s head and into the ether where Will can collect them. He clears his throat, remembering himself and remembering that he’s supposed to be the one teaching Will about boundaries.

A bit shamefaced, he says, “Just the first question.”

“How did what happen?”

“How did he win you over? Dr. Bloom said you were taken away the first time because you couldn’t kill him. What happened with that?”

Jack changes lanes, listening intently for Will’s answer. The absent radio leaves them with only the rumble of tires and the occasional whir of a car rushing past them. They’re maybe fifteen minutes out from the house.

Quietly Will replies, “He made the world flesh…” He pauses around a swallow, adding, “And blood.”

“How?”

Dr. Bloom hadn’t told Jack anything outside of what he just repeated to Will. It hadn’t seemed extremely important at the time. He’d been so concerned with getting Will cleared and soon after that he’d been wounded pursuing Charlotte Tasse and then Freddie Lounds and the Barbas situation…

There was always something.

He ignores how that’s a familiar trend in his life.

Will resituates himself in his seat and stares wordlessly out the windshield. When the words refuse to make themselves known Jack doesn’t ask again. They endure the last stretch of road taking them into Montclair, the absence of dialogue making the space between them strained and uncomfortable. Jack makes a note not to tell Bella about the one called Ose, one of only a few soft spots Will has to his name—the one Jack gave to him that Will completed and the one that’s really his, Mal’ak ha-mashḥit.

It starts raining as they turn onto his street, the air outside not cold enough to hold snow but sending down sleet anyway. Jack lets them in with his key when they get to the house. He can smell the food in the kitchen. The delivery must not have beaten them by much. He leans to one side and sets his one suitcase down by the wall next to the door.

“Bella?”

When she doesn’t answer he shrugs out of his coat and takes Will’s to hang it up next to his.

“Come with me.” Jack waves for Will to follow him into the dining room. “She’s around here somewhere.”

“She’s upstairs,” she calls from the top of the stairs. Jack backtracks and waits for her at the landing with Will right at his heels. “You just get in?”

“Yes,” he confirms, catching her hands. He greets her with a chaste kiss as she steps onto the ground floor.

“Is this him?”

He steps aside to stand at her shoulder, leaving Will on his own before Bella’s gentle but scrutinizing eyes.

It doesn’t appear to bother him being put on the spot. He outstretches one hand to Bella and announces his name evenly: “Will Graham.”

Bella turns her smile on Jack and takes Will’s hand.

“Bella Crawford.”

“You have a lovely home,” he says haltingly, earning a look from Jack.

“It must feel good not to be in a hospital anymore,” she says instead of _thank you_ , though Jack can hear it in her sympathetic tone. She’s already dropping the caution she expressly told him she would use when Jack first suggested introductions were in order.

“It is.” He ducks his head, wrapping his arms around himself when she lets his hand go. Quietly he adds, “They’re very noisy, hospitals.”

“That’s always been my experience,” she agrees, touching Jack’s arm. “I’m sorry your first meal outside of it isn’t home cooked.”

“Neither of us cooks,” Jack clarifies for Will.

Will shrugs, the picture of agreeable innocence. Jack is _really_ going to have to teach him not to show so much of what’s going on in his head to people he’s only just met—granted, he may be doing it on purpose since it’s Bella and he trusts Jack not to put him in a room with someone who would want to do him harm. It hits him then just how far that trust runs and how deeply undeserved it feels right in his chest.

He moves aside when Bella steps around him and nods at Will, a cue for them to walk together. If Will catches the conflict at work in Jack’s mind he doesn’t mention it, and if that’s the case Jack is infinitely grateful.

“Jack at least knows his way around a toaster,” Bella jokes over her shoulder.

Jack gives Will a solemn expression behind her back, causing a look of pure confusion to shiver across Will’s before he understands. He bites his lip around the laugh that wants to break loose from his throat and continues through to the dining room when Jack leads him the rest of the way.

“You can sit wherever you like.”

Will chooses a corner seat by the head of the table and waits contentedly when Jack leaves him to help with the food in the kitchen. He finds Bella spooning generous helpings of beef drunken noodles onto plates and divvies up the shrimp rolls while she goes through the cartons.

“Well, he acts like he fell out of the sky,” Bella tells him in a soft voice with her head bent and eyes on the task at hand. Impressed she adds, “Took a bullet not a week ago and not a scratch on him now. I want that healing rate.”

“Don’t we all,” Jack muses. He sets aside the empty paper bag stained with oil and bites the crumbs off his thumb. Making a grab for the Pad Thai he murmurs, “He’s got scratches. They’re just not anywhere you can see.”

“Oh?” There’s curiosity in her voice but it’s offset by remorse. “Trauma?”

“That’s maybe half of it,” he concedes, taking up a completed plate and then another. “Silverware?”

“I’ll bring some.”

He carries the plates in, setting the first down before Will and the second at the head of the table where Bella will sit. She comes in a second later with his plate and hands off the forks when he beckons for them.

He asks, mostly Bella, “What are we drinking?”

“Riesling?”

Will looks between them and shrugs when Jack returns his open, curious stare.

“Bowman said he’d pick you up at nine.”

“Are you giving me your blessing to get drunk?”

A laugh shocks its way out of Bella’s mouth and Jack purses his lips around a chuckle.

“If I _put_ a glass of wine in front of you, _will_ you get drunk?”

With a calm smile Will counters, “I can handle alcohol, Jack.”

He pulls out Bella’s chair and asks him, “You drink a lot in Tenochtitlan?”

“The Aztecs drank octli, yes; almost all of their lower class citizens partook. It was a tame thing. The consequences for drunkenness could be very severe.”

“What would they do?”

Will looks up at Bella as she’s taking her seat. Jack breaks away to retrieve the wine and Will says, “Intoxication was sometimes punishable by death.”

Jack rummages through the assortment of wines they keep in the kitchen for a good white wine in case he can’t find the Riesling Bella suggested.

She replies to Will’s comment, saying, “First offenses, too?”

“There was only one that I saw with my own eyes,” he says. Jack chooses the Kabinett near the back of the cupboard. “He was just a maize farmer, suffering a bit with the drought that year.”

As he’s taking down glasses he hears Bella ask, “Why Central America?”

“That’s where work was.” Jack imagines him shrugging. “It happens sometimes; we get sent down to take care of special cases.”

“So all angels are contractors,” Bella muses, some wariness creeping back into her tone.

“Aren’t all human beings?”

Jack brings in the bottle and the glasses, managing the four items precariously between his two hands.

“I never thought of it that way.”

“Never thought of what which way?”

Bella turns a subdued smile on him. “We’re having a philosophical discussion about the meaning of life.”

“Life’s more complicated than what we’re brought here to do,” Will protests quietly, though his voice isn’t small or unsure. “We’re more than a purpose or a calling.”

Jack pours Bella’s glass first and walks around to get Will’s. He’s glad to see they’ve started without him. It wouldn’t do for the food to have gotten cold while he was breaking the wine out.

“Did you always believe that?”

Will looks at Jack when he sits down, though it’s Bella’s question.

“It was in my wiring to believe I _was_ my purpose.” He takes a small testing sip of the Kabinett, eyes falling to the table and his food. When he senses they want more than what he’s given he continues, “I had my coding rewritten.”

Bella’s head tilts one way, fork lowering slowly but not hitting her plate.

It probably doesn’t make sense to her, Jack observes as he’s digging in. All he’d told her over the phone was that he found Will at the bottom of a crater after a lightning storm and that he and the rest of his team, including Alana Bloom, believed him to be an honest to God fallen angel. She’d sounded justifiably skeptical, but then, the internet was flooded with articles about the lightning storm they’d seen in Louisiana, the one that cast Will from the heavens. Maybe she’d spent some time reading up on all that happened, researched his angelic name, who knows what else.

He’s hungry and tired from the trip and the food is still warm enough to be enjoyable, so he’s only peripherally interested in how she decides to go at Will. The same caution he encouraged her to use he’d asked Will to use, too. So far neither of them was taking his advice.

“The new encryptions,” Bella starts, watching their guest closely. “You can use them for your work with the FBI?”

It takes a moment but Will does smile, first at his plate and then at Bella and Jack. He tells her, “Yes, I think so.”

“Well, that’s good then,” Jack jumps back into the conversation with a curt nod. “You’ve already done good work for us.” He addresses Bella, “He caught the last one in NOLA; could have done it by himself probably.”

Will looks down again, not smiling but not rejecting the praise. Maybe it doesn’t sound like praise to him.

Bella says, “It was brave what you did, keeping that woman’s partner safe. Stupid,” she amends, gently, “but brave.”

“The two things have always been conflated. They aren’t interchangeable, but bravery usually requires some measure of stupidity.” Will’s eyebrows knit together and he corrects himself. “It’s less stupidity than it is a disregard for self-preservation, which often looks like stupidity.”

“You won’t have to put yourself on the line like that again,” Jack reassures him, though it’s a promise he can’t keep. It’s the only one he ever wants to make with Will, but he couldn’t possibly uphold his end of the bargain. That’s what a promise is, after all; that’s what a promise means. “You can’t take off like that again. When you see something happening, let me take care of it. Don’t just barrel in.”

Although she doesn’t typically welcome talk about work at the dinner table, it isn’t uncomfortable to talk about this in front of Bella. Maybe it would be if it was something or someone else, but she’s obviously fascinated with Will and what he’s been through.

She even interjects when he comes to a natural pause, perhaps detecting his reluctance to use words like _always_ and _never_.

“Was your first job like this one, taking bullets for strangers at your expense?”

“I was almost hit by an atlatl, once…it was an accident.” He waves his hand as if to disperse smoke. “No, my first job was…”

Jack nods when Will looks at him from across the table. Will takes a big bite of the drunken noodles and a slow drink of wine before clearing his throat and looking Bella in the eye.

“There was a demon.” 

This is the part Jack didn’t tell her about over the phone. He figured one type of supernatural entity was enough to discover at one time. Jack watches Bella’s face, which remains very still and blank for a long time. She blinks once and shifts in her seat to raise her eyebrows at Jack.

Flatly she repeats, “A demon.”

“I told you there was more,” he says, lifting his fork to his mouth.

She turns to face forward again and tips her head back to take a long drink of the Kabinett. She swallows twice and sets the glass down.

Bella has questions, Jack can tell. She doesn’t ask them. She lets Will eat his food in peace and accepts the silence as Jack had in the car. Will only goes through the one glass, and he takes his time with it, not getting comically drunk the way Jack half expected he would. It just goes to show, really, that assumptions do actually make asses out of everyone.

It’s a quarter to eight when they finish up. Jack takes the dishes and leaves Will in the den with Bella, careful not to suspect anything remarkable to happen while he’s away. That ends up being a mistake when he hears Bella’s laugh ring out over the sound of the running water. His first thought is that Will’s discovered a Snickers candy bar hidden away in the couch and devoured it in two bites.

He joins with them again and finds Will standing by the bookcase perusing titles and Bella sitting on the couch, wine glass held in both hands.

“I worried about the wrong person getting drunk,” he teases. She hands him the glass when he goes to kiss her hair and gives him a serious look, nothing about her countenance is muzzy in the slightest. When the wine glass is out of her hands she reaches up to hold his wrist in place by her shoulder where his hand has come to rest. To Will he says, “You can sit.”

“All right.”

Will takes the armchair across from the couch, and he looks at home enough that Jack sits, too. He’s fully prepared to dive back into angel and demons talk, so he’s surprised when they pass the time quietly trading small talk and anecdotes instead.

Bowman comes to collect Will at nine on the dot, a smile on his face and water droplets clinging to his hair. Bella walks with Will to the door and Bowman is happy to see them both: Bella because he sees her so rarely and Will because he’s happy to have some company for the foreseeable future at his isolated home out in Wolf Trap. Will shakes Bella’s hand at the door, the softest suggestion of red dusting across the bridge of his nose when he tells her good night.

Jack goes with them out to the car and tells Bowman to drive safely, though he doesn’t need to. Before Will gets into the car Jack reminds him of their trip to Baltimore in the morning. Will nods and promptly opens the door to tell Bowman so he’ll know to drive into Quantico earlier than he normally would.

“Got it, boss,” Bowman assures him with a steady nod.

Will slides into the car and pulls the door shut behind him. Jack pounds on the roof and watches them drive up the street until they turn off and out of sight. He trudges back up the driveway and walks through the front door again, closed to keep the cold out.

“He’s just a kid,” Bella says gently from her post by the coat rack where she’s been waiting since he left to see Will and Bowman out. “In a lot of ways he’s just a kid.”

“In a lot of ways he’s more than either of us could ever comprehend.”

“Why did he fall where you could find him?”

It’s a calculated shift in the conversation. Her train of thought is one he can always follow, can always trace even if she doesn’t want him to for this reason or the other.

“He has a gift.”

“Outside of having once been a divine being?”

The look on her face isn’t disbelieving, but she is looking to be convinced. He gives it his best shot.

“He was an angel of death; that was his function.”

“His job,” she clarifies.

“Yes.”

“How does that make him useful to you now? Is he…killing for you?”

“No, no.” He shakes his head, showing his palms as he comes to stand in front of her. “No, he’s _finding_ killers. He’s _tracking_ them for us.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He can reconstruct them exactly as they happened, put the evidence that we’ve collected together and lead us to the people responsible.”

“That’s not what I don’t understand,” she stops him. “He got away from it. Why would you put him back?”

“Bella,” he sighs, dropping his arms to his sides. “It’s work he wants to do. It’s work he _knows_ he’ll succeed at.”

“You heard him, Jack,” she insists. “He’s more than the most important assignment you could give him, more than his biggest accomplishment, whatever that ends up being. He’s a person; he’s a whole person, separate from any gift or strength you can use or cultivate. There’s a life outside of this that he never had a chance to seek out but that he can now.”

“I’ve had this same conversation with him myself.” He bends down to retrieve his suitcase and makes slowly for the stairs. “He wants to be out there. He wants to make a difference in whatever way he can.”

“If the battlefield is all he knows of course he’ll hesitate to get off of it.” She plants herself at the landing. He stops and turns to look at her, one hand on his suitcase and one on the railing. “You’re taking an awful risk.”

“That’s what this job is. He knows that. After what happened with Charlotte Tasse there’s no way he can’t know.”

“Jack.”

“Bella, he’s doing it. Every person he’s come into contact with since he came down has informed him of his options, and he’s decided. It’s decided.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

He watches her, and she watches him. When she turns to go he sets his suitcase down and takes quick, short steps back down to the ground floor. She doesn’t stop just because he walks a ways after her, and she doesn’t stop when he stops. It takes words.

“There’s something coming.”

Her footsteps stall and she half turns, giving him her profile.

“What’s coming?”

“I don’t know yet,” he admits, faltering. “I don’t know what it is or if there’s any way to stop it, but it’s coming for him, Bella.”

“Why? How do you know?”

She looks at him and turns to face him when he approaches.

“The night we dug him out of that crater, there was something…starting; something that it triggered, something dangerous that’s for him and because of him.”

“And you think you can protect him from it?”

He struggles to find the right words, but there’s only one way to say it. It’s a secret he hasn’t given to a single soul, one he’s been careful not to think about around Will; it’s one he hasn’t been able to conceptualize beyond just cataloguing the instinct itself. It’s stubborn on the way out, but there’s only one way to tell a simple truth. For all its intricacy, it is simple at its most basic part, and that’s the part that he confesses.

“I think I’m supposed to take him to it.”

Bella doesn’t have a reply. She just searches his eyes, looking for an emotion or a truth he isn’t sure he wants her to find. When she finds it, or when she doesn’t, she circles her arms around his waist and lays her head on his shoulder.

They speak nothing more on it that night or the following morning. His alarm wakes her, but she turns onto her side and goes back to sleep. There’s nothing else to say on the matter. He’ll give her the time she needs to process, and once she’s decided what it all means she’ll help him to make the right decision. She’s good for that, for reminding him where the ground is so he doesn’t drift and fall from too high up. He eats a quick breakfast, making as little noise as he can as he bustles around in the kitchen.

Bowman beats Jack to HQ. He’s showing Will how the coffee machine in the break room works. Jack walks up behind them right as Bowman’s saying, “You don’t want to use this unless you’re about to collapse. It’s quite literally the worst coffee in the world.”

“Don’t let the interns hear you talking like that,” Jack warns blearily. “You’ll break their hearts.”

Bowman has the grace to look embarrassed when he whirls around at the sound of Jack’s voice. He says, “Hi, Jack.”

Jack gives him a flat look and a nod. To Will, “You all set?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go then.”

“I’ll see you,” Bowman calls after Will, who turns and waves.

“Did you like staying with him okay?”

“He had a dog,” Will replies. At first Jack thinks he’s deflecting, but the soft smile on Will’s face tells a different story. “He called him Winston, like Churchill.”

“You’re a fan?”

“He was one of mine, actually,” Will tells him as they’re getting into Jack’s car.

“You…” Jack halts the key halfway to the ignition. “What, you _reaped_ Winston Churchill?”

“It was nothing personal.” Will’s voice does take on a defensive edge, though. “The man had ninety years, suffered multiple strokes by the end of them. He lived while he had the time.”

“You reaped Winston Churchill.”

“Yes,” Will says, fumbling with his seatbelt. Reverently he admits what Jack actually wants to hear: “It was a privilege, a high honor. Even among mine he was a giant.”

Jack dumbly fits the key into the ignition and switches on the radio.

“You don’t have to be prime minister to be a giant, though,” Will says thoughtfully some minutes later over a B. B. King song he turns to. “There were plenty I saw who were quickly forgotten, lost in the passage of time.”

“You said before that you weren’t supposed to watch us live out our lives.”

“I also said I have something of an issue with following orders.”

“I’m starting to get that about you.” Jack turns the radio down so it’s just a hum over the turning tires on the road. “Why didn’t you follow that one?”

“Ever since…since Ose…”

“Made the world flesh and blood?”

There’s a coiling in the air, a tension that ripples through the atmosphere in the car. Will says, “Yes.”

“It made you curious.”

“It was like stepping away from the warmth of the fireplace and being chilled for just a second by the snow outside, feeling every flake land and burst apart on your skin.” Jack sees Will lick his lips just before he turns his face to the window again. “That’s how he did it.”

“Did what?”

“You asked before how he made the world…physical, and that’s how he did it. He lured me away from a fire that was all I knew and made me see how good the cold could feel on my skin.”

“The cold will burn you out before too long,” Jack tells him, relating something deeper than just the obvious.

“So will fire,” Will retorts absently. He shrugs in his seat and says, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

They drive a ways further on the freeway and Will turns the music back up. He flips through station after station when the one he likes slips into a commercial break. The operatic channel catches static; the contemporary rap enraptures him for all of twenty seconds before he presses another button with a deeply perplexed look on his face; he lands on an old school hip hop station playing Wu Tang Clan and to Jack’s surprise, leaves it. He even leans back into his seat and taps his fingers on his leg in time with the beat.

Jack listens for the places where Will reacts to the song, listens for the thing driving him to keep the music as it is. He resigns himself to the belief that maybe Will just likes the sound, but then he hears a line ring out like an off-key note disrupting an orchestral composition.

“ _A death kiss, catwalk, squeeze another anthem—Hold it for ransom, tranquilized with anesthetics._ ”

Will stiffens, eyes falling closed and head tilting slightly to the left as if he’s listening for a message and U-God is the prophet streamlining the future with words from a distant past. Jack can’t watch him for longer than a span of just a few seconds, but the little that he sees doesn’t help his growing sense of dread. He looks touched, not sentimentally but like something’s seeped into him and spread like a virus.

_Like a cell dividing._

“Will?” He waits a beat, switches off the radio. Will starts out of his daze with the disconnection of the stream of consciousness-type lyrics. “You all right?”

“Sure, Jack,” he says.

If Will were made to stand right now his knees would shake. Jack can’t explain how he knows or where the thought comes from, but something in Will’s voice is wobbly, warbled. He doesn’t have to stand for a while yet, which is lucky for both of them. Jack needs him on his best legs to square off with Chilton if worse comes to worse.

“Where’d you go?”

“What?”

“You checked out. Where did you go?”

“I’m here,” Will objects, indignant.

“But you weren’t. You slipped away.”

“I…” Will stares at him, a deep frown set in his mouth and bringing his eyebrows down in agitated furrows. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, you were listening to the music, and then you got lost somewhere else.”

There’s an answer, but Will doesn’t have it. When enough time passes he leans back into his seat and stares out the windshield. Jack switches the radio back on and keeps the volume to a minimum.

“If you ever feel that trying to happen again, remember it; remember the context and if you can’t figure out what it means you tell me. We’ll get to the answer together if that’s the only weapon we have.”

Will mumbles, “What weapon?”

“What you see,” Jack says. “It’s your best weapon and someday…” He means _the_ someday, the day the danger comes to take him. “Someday it’ll be your best defense.”

“Mine or ours?”

“Yours, Will.”

That’s all either has to say about the mystery of Will’s mind, so they leave it at that. The classical station has played through its commercials, so when Will’s battle with the radio buttons takes him there he stays there. They get to the exit for Chilton’s hospital at the close of a Verdi tune.

“ _Del mio pensiero tu sei regina. Tu di mia vita sei lo splendor. Il tuo bel cielo vorrei ridarti…_ ”

Jack misses the next line as he’s translating those ones in his head, brokenly.

_Of my thoughts you are my queen; of my life, splendor. I to you your beautiful skies give back._

“ _…Ergerti un trono vicino al sol._ ”

_Build a throne near to the sun._

It’s lucky he can make out any of it. He has his trip to Italy to thank for that and Bella, for teaching him more than just what he needed to survive on the streets.

Will doesn’t have an adverse reaction to Verdi, though he looks restless when Jack parks the car. Alana Bloom’s car is already on the other side of the lot. She meets them at the doors to the building and greets them both, a formal _good morning_ for Jack and a much warmer _hi_ for Will. He’s not stung by it. Their relationship, Jack’s and Alana’s, has always been strictly professional. Maybe on a good day they might be friends, but today is average at best. He didn’t get enough sleep in Louisiana.

Dr. Bloom takes up the spot by Jack’s shoulder and walks beside him. She asks, “Does Chilton know you’re bringing me with you?”

“I didn’t mention it when I got on the phone with him the night before last.”

“Serves him right if he’s surprised,” she murmurs, going through the door and waiting on the other side for first Will and then Jack to pass through.

They stop at the front desk to speak to the man working the computer there and then proceed on to the corridor that takes them to Chilton’s office. At the door that buzzes open Jack goes to hold the door again and stops in his tracks when he sees Will isn’t behind him.

“Will?”

He’s wandered off to the opposite side of the lobby, near the bolted door that leads further into the hospital where some of the patients are kept. The man at the desk is watching Will just as keenly as Jack and now Alana are. He’s just starting to stand when Chilton’s voice calls out and interrupts their speechless observation of Will’s staring contest with the heavy, looming door.

“Agent Crawford—and Dr. Bloom, wonderful to see you again,” he drawls, coming to an uneven halt when his eyes land on Will. “Mr. Graham,” he says, to no one. He steps around Alana and then Jack. “Mr. Graham, is it?”

Will turns belatedly, an intent look on his face that lasts about a second before it flickers. His eyes slide to Jack’s and he shakes his head once subtly.

_Barbas is gone._

“It’s a pleasure to put a face to the name,” Chilton announces, loud enough that Jack can hear him and with an overly friendly chord to his words.

When Will takes his hand in a rehearsed, albeit uncertain gesture, Chilton drops his voice, leans in a fraction, and whispers something that illuminates Will with palpable fear and a mad brand of curiosity. Will pulls away from him and rakes his eyes over Chilton’s face, checking for information he didn’t see the first time. Jack can feel his own heart sink when Will doesn’t find it, when his shoulders droop and his posture wilts with it.

Chilton looks just as disappointed and takes his hand away, the disgust in his expression and in his body language masked by extreme displeasure. He looks almost overwhelmed with it. When he speaks he sounds heartbroken, and something about it drives a chill down Jack’s spine: “Will that be all then?”

Chilton’s looking at the far wall. Will’s looking at his own empty hands.

Jack studies Will, concerned and bewildered and flustered for lack of anything better to feel. Frustration might be the best description for that knot welled up in his gut. Frustration at an opportunity lost, at a connection missed.

“Yes,” Alana speaks for him, all her ire gone, too. “That’s all.”

“Well, I’m sorry you made the drive for nothing,” Chilton says with a forced alacrity. He breezes past them, voice trembling when he calls over his shoulder, “See our guests out, Mr. Brown.”

The man at the computer, still standing, opens his mouth and then shuts it again, reconsidering. He walks around the desk and gestures for the doors, silent, stern.

Will snaps out of his melancholy when Mr. Brown looks his way. Absolutely shaken he says, “There’s a patient here I need to see.”

Mr. Brown pauses. A thin voice that, Jack doesn’t think, fits the lanky but authoritative body asks, genuinely curious, “Who?”

“I don’t…” Will tosses a desperate look in Jack’s general direction, lost, miserable. “I don’t know who, but he’s somewhere in there. It’s important.”

Mr. Brown doesn’t need convincing, which strikes Jack as highly incongruous and worthy of alert.

“It’ll have to be another day,” he answers, on the verge of sounding apologetic. He spares less than a glance to Jack and Alana over his shoulder. “I’ll see what I can do.”

It’s enough to pacify Will. Jack holds his tongue until they’re outside, and even then Alana beats him to the punch.

“What was that about?”

“There’s someone here,” Will intones urgently, quickly becoming very upset. “There’s someone here. I need to talk to him.”

Jack gets his hands on Will’s arms, grip gentle but firm. “ _Who is it_ , Will?”

“It’s…”

The doors clamor open and Mr. Brown comes jogging down the stairs, perfectly unaware of Will’s rapidly deteriorating peace of mind. He has a business card in his hand with a number scrawled on the back. It’s clear by the focused look in his eyes and the way his gaze lingers on Will that he means for the card to go to Will, but he gives it to Jack, making no mistake as to their arrangement. 

Will has his eyes on him the whole time. He murmurs a quiet, “Thank you.”

Mr. Brown doesn’t say, _your welcome_. His eyes soften and his shoulders press back a bit to correct his posture, and then he’s turning and bounding swiftly up the stairs and through the door. Will pushes his own shoulders back a few seconds later. It doesn’t calm him down, but the business card does, when Jack coolly hands it off. Alana watches him do it, a concerned expression taking over her features.

When she asks who it is that Will needs to speak to inside Chilton’s hospital, Will takes a deep breath and says, “Someone like me; another who fell.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dr. Loosen Blue Slate Estate Kabinett 2012  
> http://www.wine.com/v6/Dr-Loosen-Blue-Slate-Estate-Kabinett-2012/wine/124097/Detail.aspx
> 
> Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
> 
> Wu Tang Clan: “Triumph”
> 
> Giuseppe Verdi: “Celeste Aida” (I checked a few different sources for this, but Wikipedia is just the easiest to navigate if you don’t know what you’re looking for—check the actually good translation to have a prettier picture of what the lyrics in their entirety mean.)  
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeste_Aida


	5. Ring of Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matthew works himself almost to the bone trying to fill Will Graham’s request.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The taste of love is sweet / When hearts like ours meet / I fell for you like a child, / Oh, but the fire went wild / I fell into a burning ring of fire, / I went down, down, down as the flames went higher / And it burns, burns, burns / The ring of fire, the ring of fire_

It’s the look on Chilton’s face as it correlates with the look on Will Graham’s face that captivates Matthew completely. Maybe he has a penchant for taking in strays or helping the needy, but he gravitates toward distress like a sailor steering his ship to the North Star.

Will Graham can be Matthew’s project for as long as he needs this favor from him, and then he will go back to drifting. Both of them will, probably.

_Wouldn’t it be interesting if…_

_No, Matthew._

He backs off hypotheticals and conditional statements. They’re half-promises. By the time he completes them and turns them into realized thoughts, he’ll be disappointed. It’s not a new pattern. The habit is burned into his brain, and he needs to forget it.

Matthew uses his lunch break to rig a false audio feed into Chilton’s computer for when he goes to spool through the day’s conversations later. It’s just a bunch of old recordings spliced together, and anyway, they’ve had a slow day today. After Will Graham and his compatriots left, Chilton made a fortress out of his office, told Matthew not to buzz anyone through without clearing them with him first, and basically shut the hospital down altogether.

Even if he hadn’t already been contracted to help, Matthew would have tracked Will Graham down and begged for the commission just to get to the bottom of Chilton’s agitation. Nothing against the boss or anything, but Matthew’s always been an ambitious kind of character. He likes to be in with the strongest player on the board, and if his alliance with Graham can give him something over Chilton, even if he can never use it or understand the essence of the problem itself, he wants in.

Knowledge rules his heart — the pursuit of it does.

After he’s done switching off all the cameras and replacing the live surveillance with looped material, he makes his rounds. They have a dozen patients behind the door Graham specified. Matthew’s happy to have the suspect pool narrowed down to twelve, but he still has no idea what he’s looking for.

He can’t ask for specifics, can’t ask for a direction. All Graham gave him, all he seemed _capable_ of giving him, was an identifiable gender. His initial sweep doesn’t give him anything useful either. No one’s riled in the slightest by Will Graham’s visit. They have no way of knowing Chilton has fallen into a state of crisis, and so they don’t react to said state of crisis. Matthew sees that their lunches are all delivered and lingers a while longer, watching and cataloguing.

None of them pay him any mind. They’re used to his invasions by now.

Not to be deterred by their apathy, he starts with Falkenrath, just pulls up a chair and sits outside his cell and waits to be acknowledged. It takes a while, but Falkenrath cracks. He stops halfway through his sandwich and asks, roughly, “What?”

“What’d you do before you ended up here, Peregrine?”

Matthew knows his file back and forth; he knows he studied mechanical engineering at Columbia, graduated with honors, and never got married, though he’d been with the same woman for twelve years when police arrested him for seven counts of murder. They had four kids and a German shepherd at the time. The woman’s name was Calista Borgnino.

Falkenrath’s lawyer shot himself their second week in court, and the judge ordered a mistrial. He’s been in this same cell for six years.

“Delivered newspapers in my formative years — good for casing neighborhoods,” he says sardonically with his mouth full. “Before that I caught insects in my grandmother’s backyard and pulled their wings off. That what you want to hear, _Sir_?”

“When’d the SZA first hit you? That’s not in the file.”

Falkenrath rolls his eyes. Matthew can’t imagine Will Graham would need anything from him. He scoffs and glances pointedly at the walls and under his cot. Matthew waves his hand.

“Just you and me for now, Perry.” Matthew waits for Falkenrath’s pensive nod. “So when was the first time?”

“First week of grad school, must have been.” He shrugs. “Moved out of the dorms, got myself an apartment, worked at a newspaper that really shouldn’t have hired me, met Callie…”

“You were up and down a lot,” Matthew prompts. “Highs and lows.”

“You ever see Goya’s Black Paintings?”

“Like _The Forcibly Bewitched_?”

“Same artist, different period of his life.”

“The Black Paintings came after?”

“Yeah, dark stuff.” He drinks his milk and pushes his tray away. “Why’d you cut the feeds?”

“Chilton’s not the only one with a vested interest in you gents.”

“That so?”

“Yeah, that’s so.”

“Well, I’m honored.”

Falkenrath stares blankly at Matthew for a while, not fidgeting or eating or blinking. A smile tugs at Matthew’s lips.

“Anyone ever tell you your name literally means Falcon Falcon-keeper?”

The answering sigh tells him yes. “Got a thing for birds, Brown?”

“More a hawk man myself.” He shrugs. “One more question.”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you marry her?”

Falkenrath closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t want her to be a widow when the end came.”

“Well, she still writes you letters. She’s hardly a widow.”

The hand obscuring Falkenrath’s face drops away, and the other smartass comments Matthew could probably make shrivel right off his tongue.

“I’ll be back for your tray, Perry.”

“Yeah.”

He repeats this process, and it takes him the better part of an hour just clearing one side of the hall. Weary, he retreats downstairs to archives and goes through each man’s file alphabetically, trying to find a detail somewhere in the stitching that doesn’t agree. The regular archives guy has to be bribed to switch positions with him and man the front desk, but Matthew manages to talk him into it with a mere promise for coffee next week. It’s a small price to pay.

Matthew reads with his back hunched over and his face near the files for close to two hours before deciding he’s coming at the problem from the wrong angle. He can’t find anything bizarre in the files because he’s too familiar with them, knows all their contents as intimately as he knows the streaks in the wood of the front desk.

He searches Will Graham on his phone.

There’s alarmingly little to find — at least on the Will Graham that came in with Agent Crawford and Dr. Bloom. The flood of pages his search engine tries to give him is overwhelming, too expansive for his timetable. He searches Will Graham and Jack Crawford together and gets TattleCrime.com.

“ _If Angels Really Could Fall from Heaven,_ ” he reads with an incredulous laugh. “Oh, my God, Will Graham, what did you do to get on this woman’s radar…”

Freddie Lounds’ blog links to the Times-Picayune, and Matthew reads sparingly about a freak lightning storm and bloody serial killings. Will Graham helped Jack Crawford catch the killer and her accomplice. He’d been shot in the process — people had crept into his hospital room and snapped photos of him while he was still on the mend.

He looks a bit like what Matthew remembers from that morning, only more sallow under the camera’s flash. It isn’t a very flattering shot. He surmises it wasn’t meant to be.

The walkie-talkie at his hip crackles with static; regular archives guy is clocking out. Matthew’s needed back at the desk. Frantic with the need to make the best of this trip, he grabs the last two files he hadn’t skimmed to the point of memorization. He grabs the files on Conleth MacCailín and Abel Gideon, criticizing himself as he goes for not starting with them. Upstairs Regular Archives says something clever to Matthew on his way out like he was waiting for him to come up so he could say goodbye.

“See ya tomorrow,” Matthew enthuses, a bit over the top with it if he’s being honest.

Regular Archives likes it fine enough. He smiles and heads off on his merry way. Matthew reads until it’s dinnertime and sits across from Conleth MacCailín like he did with the first six patients on the other side.

“Hello, Matthew,” he says brightly, plucking a piece of boiled cauliflower off the tray with his fingers. “How’s tricks then?”

“What do you think, Mr. MacCailín?” 

Conleth chuckles, brings his legs up onto the cot, and eats an apple slice, still using his fingers. He’s a bit too attuned to Matthew’s eyes on him, much more than the others had been. The scrutiny makes it harder to intimidate. Nearly every man in this ward can beat Matthew — and Chilton — in a staring contest.

None of them speak with Conleth MacCailín’s accent.

“Well, I _hear_ you put the taps to bed. If that’s true, Matty, I think you’ve gone snooping behind daddy’s back. Not good for trust-building, is it?” Conleth hums and spears a macaroni noodle with his spork. “But I guess Frederick already trusts you enough to put the taps up in the first place, doesn’t he.”

“How do you know I didn’t put them back on after I left the first time?”

“Did you?” Conleth smiles when Matthew doesn’t answer right away. “No, not you, Matty. Unfinished business; I can see it glinting in your eyes like a peat briquette the moment before it catches fire.”

He leans forward on his cot and gives Matthew the unearthly sensation of being much closer to him than he actually is. Matthew swallows, crosses his legs.

“What’re you looking for, Matthew?”

Matthew resists the urge to scrub his hands over his face and give away his position. “Someone that might not even exist.”

“A ghost.” Conleth eats another piece of cauliflower with his fingers. “In here.”

“I got a tip.”

Conleth laughs, loud, and sneers, “A journalist?”

“Police.”

“Oh, well, naturally,” Conleth says, voice dripping with sarcasm. “My first move if I was helping cops would be to cut the cameras, too.”

“Not exactly legal, are they,” Matthew muses, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward in his chair. He chides himself for taking this exchange lightly, for treating it like a frivolity when he’s supposed to be working — in two senses of the word. “Tell me about your life before this.”

“The condensed version?”

“Just the part when you knew.”

Calm shudders unevenly over Conleth’s face. He’s got a few years on Matthew, but he looks older when he sits still; he could use a shave, but he hasn’t asked for one in weeks.

“When I knew I was crazy, that’s what you mean?” Conleth doesn’t wait for Matthew to respond. “Uh,” he sighs, blustery, “I was nineteen.” He fixes his eyes on a spot near Matthew’s feet, glossy eyes. “Tried to…I was in Liverpool when this happened, just a fuckin’…punk kid, dirt poor, drunk all the time.”

“What did you do?”

Conleth flicks his eyes up at Matthew, and he looks betrayed.

“What’s it to you anyway, Matty? You gonna talk to the powers that be, get me a reduced sentence for that bloke I stabbed?” He laughs, a wet sound. “Doesn’t matter when I noticed. Everything’s ruined now.”

Matthew holds his ground. He doesn’t have anything he can offer; still has no fucking clue what he’s looking for and can see that Conleth has no idea why he’s even agreed to tell him what he has so far. He didn’t ask the right question. They need a push in another direction.

“What was…” Matthew licks his lips, uncertain. “What was your happiest moment, before?”

The eyes looking back at him are blue. Matthew always used to think they were that impossible shade Liz Taylor had. He’d heard before that it was impossible to have eyes like that, violet eyes.

Another beat skips by and Matthew asks, “Well, what was it?”

“My grandparents took me to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal when I was a boy.”

“What were their names?”

“Darragh and Aoife MacCailín.”

“Your father’s parents?”

“Yes.”

Matthew nods, clocks Conleth’s half-eaten dinner. “How would you go about finding a ghost?”

With a disinterested nibble at an apple slice, Conleth says, “You’ve got to summon him.”

“Yeah, but how?”

“Going off your crazed air right about now I’d say somebody’s already summoned him.” Matthew doesn’t shrink away from Conleth’s curious, probing stare. “Who was it asked you to look into this ghost?”

“Concerned third party. Guy’s a nobody.”

“Doubt that,” Conleth muses wryly. “No one halfway ordinary ever catches your attention, Matty boy.”

Provoked and not caring to show that he is, Matthew deflects, “Think this ghost’ll be ordinary?”

“Are any of us ordinary.”

Seriously, Matthew asks him, “Is it you?”

“Had my chance for that and botched it,” Conleth says around a shrug. “Guess you wouldn’t know if it was me.”

“Would you know?”

“Guess I would, probably.”

“Are you sure it’s not you?”

Conleth smirks, pops a grape into his mouth.

“When do you think you’ll have the feeds up and running again?”

“Either tonight or tomorrow morning.”

“Tonight like after lights-out?”

“Yes, Mr. MacCailín.” 

Conleth nods, takes up a thick apple slice, and rises from the cot. He approaches the bars separating him from the open corridor and keeping him from crossing into Matthew’s space. Matthew’s read his file up and down, and various behavior patterns suggest he might transgress if given half a chance. Some incidents in the past suggest he’d shrink away from any opportunity. Conleth MacCailín is a wildcard. He’s only been with them for something like four months.

His voice goes gentle. “Is calling me Mr. MacCailín supposed to emphasize the disparities in our stations?”

Matthew stands when Conleth stops right at the place where he can’t go any farther. The chair scrapes behind him.

“Does it work?”

Damn it, he sounds breathless.

“How’s it feel when I call you Sir?”

_Shit._

The corners of Conleth’s eyes crinkle. “Not much better then?”

Matthew rolls his eyes, starts to fold up his chair.

“Hey, if they don’t give me life in prison at my hearing next month,” Conleth says, sounding incongruously hopeful. “Take me out for a drink.”

Matthew’s heart sinks, but he forces himself to smile. “All the drinks you want, Connie.”

The smile the nickname earns him actually breaks his heart, but he doesn’t react. He just carries the chair to the wall, quietly advises Conleth to finish his dinner, and heads for the final cell left unexplored, that of Abel Gideon.

He instructs Gideon to approach the bars and face the opposite wall, cuffs him, and escorts him, alone, to the cages. One of the guards has a questioning look on his face, but Matthew waves him off with some excuse about Chilton calling in a profiler to come talk at Gideon for some thesis or dissertation. They let him go through, bored and ready to clock out for the night.

Matthew sits Abel Gideon in his personal favorite cage, the middle one nearest the windows on the other side of the room. He goes quietly, doesn’t speak a word until the door is shut and locked. Once Matthew’s settled, Gideon murmurs, “I’ll say, bit of a fumble bringing me to a room with no eyes or ears anywhere.”

“You and I’ve got eyes and ears,” Matthew retorts with a calm smile on his face. It was helpful seeing Conleth first. He feels lightness in his chest with a twist of deep solemnity a little bit deeper. “How long have you been here, Dr. Gideon?”

Matthew knows the answer to this question, too.

“One year, three months, Mr. Brown.” He smiles, not a friendly gesture. “Just a little bit longer than you.”

Matthew nods, doing speedy calculations in his head and coming up with the number that corroborates Gideon’s statement. “Yeah, that’s right.”

Gideon stares for a moment, gears turning behind stony blue-gray eyes. His expression shifts, hardens in some untraceable way that Matthew can’t define until Gideon speaks, a quirk of emotion drifting into his tone that’s only just more than idle curiosity. “A little bird told me you’ve got some sort of independent curiosity in our lot of misguided youths-turned-old-men.”

“You’re not old, Doctor.”

“Not young either, I’m afraid,” he sighs. Whimsical, he adds, “Time does tick by.”

It feels like a clue. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but he’s made it into a common theme by now, asking about memories and origins, childhoods, the onset of mental illness.

“Time’s a funny thing,” Matthew starts, feeling his way and going into it perfectly sightless and unsteadied.

Gideon waits, and the title from Will Graham’s page in Freddie Lounds’ blog comes back to him.

_If Angels Fall Really Could Fall from Heaven._

“I’ve heard that mankind created time. Do you think it exists after death?”

“Time, Mr. Brown, or Creation?”

“Either.”

“Both do.”

Matthew lets a pause rest between them and answers his unasked question when Gideon makes no move to do so. “Decomposition lends itself to biological creation, I can see that. But time?”

Gideon’s drawl is unimpressed. “It’s all a matter of perspective.”

“What about Heaven?”

“What about it?”

Matthew watches, and he thinks he sees Gideon’s jaw tighten up and lock. The reaction lasts a few seconds, if that, before the tension gives way to boredom.

“Do you think it exists?”

Gideon doesn’t answer.

“I mean, if all we can contribute after death is some organic mulch for the plants and the earthworms, then what’s the soul got to do with it? Do we even have souls?”

The laugh Gideon grants him is terse, impatient. “Did you bring me out here to philosophize about life and death?”

“I brought you out here because I think you’re the ghost.”

There’s no reaction to this blatant surrendering of the truth. Gideon’s already assimilated himself to Matthew’s inquiries, his halfhearted accusations. His eyes look especially flat, too much of an effort to exude disinterest.

“This is all very cryptic and mystical, Mr. Brown, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Fair enough.” Matthew straightens up in his chair. “What do you know about Will Graham?”

Right on time he answers, “Never heard of him.”

“Really? Because he came here this morning to talk to Chilton, freaked out, and demanded to see you instead. It was almost like he thought he knew you from somewhere.”

“He asked to see me,” Abel says, disbelief evident in his tone, “Abel Gideon.”

“He didn’t ask to see any of them.”

“Didn’t ask to see you either, did he? Shame.” Gideon tuts. “Conleth MacCailín is permanently unattainable and Stephen from Archives makes your lip curl, and not in the tasty way.”

Distracted, Matthew says, “There’s a tasty way to…” He clicks his tongue. “You know how I know Will Graham meant you, Doctor?”

“Do tell. I’m salivating for your completely circumstantial proof.”

“You didn’t ask why I cut the cameras.” 

Gideon’s face drops, maybe a hair, before correcting. He looks away, a smile fluttering on his lips. “I like to be original. Eleven other patients _had_ already asked you the same question by the time you brought me out here.”

Matthew shakes his head, at the end of his rope already with the endless circles he’s run around these twelve men — thirteen if he counts Chilton.

“Will Graham thinks there’s something he _recognizes_ in you. Is there any way that could be true?”

For a moment, he thinks he’s lost the battle. He’s prepared to take Gideon back to his cell and groan and gripe in his car for the next six to eight hours until he has to shower and shave for work the following morning. For a protracted moment, he thinks Abel Gideon is going to assign that fate to him.

Abel’s frown deepens, and he intones, about three times more serious than he usually is just by default, “This Will Graham, what exactly did he say to you?”

“He said there was a patient in your corridor that he needed to see; he didn’t have a name, but he specified male and said it was important that he and this person met.”

The shift in Gideon’s demeanor is dynamic. He becomes almost professorial, diplomatic, to an extent.

“Why did he come here?”

“He had to see Chilton about something. They looked at each other, Chilton said something to him, Graham got upset…”

“Did you hear what he said?”

“Um…he said ‘you’re welcome’ and then a name. I couldn’t hear it right, but it wasn’t English.”

Gideon stands. “What was the name?”

“Jeez, uh,” Matthew mumbles, searching the reel of his memory for the scene that morning.

He’d been listening, but Chilton had dropped his voice, had obscured the word almost beyond coherency for the sake of secrecy. His lips hadn’t moved much to form the name, so it was comprised of only a few syllables, maybe even one — but no, his lips had pulled back around a second syllable and that had been the end of it. It was a two syllable name.

_You’re welcome…_

_Was it?_

“I don’t know, I can’t…Will Graham would know, if you spoke to him.”

Gideon’s frown changes and he rolls his eyes. “There’s the rub.”

“I’m bringing him back to see you. It’s happening; there just isn’t a date yet.”

“Good luck okaying that with Chilton,” Gideon teases, all sarcasm.

“Don’t underestimate me.”

It’s very nearly a threat. Matthew doesn’t know what he would do to follow through with it; switch Gideon’s medication, sneak laxatives into his food? The ploys would be unsophisticated and childish. Gideon, maybe tracking Matthew’s thoughts, smirks, pleased with himself. Matthew huffs a long, tired sigh and moves Gideon back to his cell.

Chilton is still brooding like a stolen princess in his office, so Matthew skips that part of his assignment for tonight. He’s done enough damage where damage needed doing until tomorrow, maybe even until next week.

When he clocks out he has a text message on his phone from a number he doesn’t recognize asking him to call when he’s free. He presses dial. Matthew doesn’t know the voice that answers, but that problem is quickly remedied when the unidentified male speaker hands the phone off to Will Graham.

“Matthew Brown?”

“Yeah, hi. Mr. Graham.”

“Were you…I know it was an impossible task I asked of you.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Matthew reassures him, rubbing at his eyes and stifling a yawn. “I found someone who I think fits your not-profile.”

“My…who is it?”

“Name’s Abel Gideon. Guy used to be a surgeon. Snapped one day and killed his wife and her family.”

Morosely, Graham replies, “That’s awful.”

“Um.” Matthew locks his car doors and slides his key into the ignition without turning the engine over. “It was, I guess. Do you think he could be your guy?”

“I’ve never heard of him before.”

“Oh.”

“No, I mean — yes is what I mean. If he is who I think he is, then I wouldn’t expect to know him by his name.”

“That’s…very strange and complicated.”

Will Graham sighs, “So I’ve been told.”

“Look, I can’t make any promises, but I’m going to try and work something out with Chilton. He’s a stubborn guy when he wants to be, so it could take weeks, maybe longer until the man comes around.”

“I appreciate your looking into it, Matthew.”

Matthew wakes up a bit when his name trips intimately in his ear riding the wavelengths of Will Graham’s voice. It should be illegal to sound so completely informal when just saying another person’s name.

This thing Matthew has for men with violent lives is really not doing him any favors.

“Well, anything to help a friend,” Matthew says, starting his car so he won’t have to pay attention to the sad little dip making his heartbeat semi-erratic. He gets the heater going and turns off the radio, already turned down very low anyway. “Besides, it’s every orderly’s dream to do some heavy-duty sleuthing for a mysterious stranger.”

“I hadn’t introduced myself when I asked for your help. Lloyd said that was bad manners on my part.”

Lloyd must be the first voice Matthew heard on the phone.

“I didn’t take it personally, Mr. Graham. You looked pretty discombobulated at the time.”

There’s a stutter of silence. Graham clears his throat and asks, “Dr. Chilton?”

“Guy’s been holed up in his office since you left.” An idea occurs to Matthew. “He, um, said something to you before it all went south. I heard part of it, but I missed the name.”

“It was just a misunderstanding.” Matthew doesn’t think he imagines the bitter chord in Will Graham’s voice.

“Abel Gideon was very interested in that name. I couldn’t tell him what it was, but he sat up and paid attention when he thought I would.”

“I can’t tell you what it was.”

Faking nonchalance, Matthew says, “Chilton might if you don’t.”

“That’s his prerogative,” comes the answer with just as much nonchalance.

Matthew frowns and leans back in his seat. “I’ll call you tomorrow, Mr. Graham.”

He hangs up and goes to take the car out of park when he remembers the cameras. Matthew sighs, switches the car off, and goes running back up the steps. The lot is deserted, and the interior was just the same when Matthew left it. In another hour or so the graveyard shift would filter in and monitor the quiet hours from midnight to morning. The patients would sleep or they wouldn’t.

Standing at the front desk with his back to Matthew is Chilton himself, removed at last from his tower. “You must think I’m a fool,” he says without turning around.

Matthew waits, shuffling a bit on his feet and crossing his arms uncertainly.

“Well, Mr. Brown? Let’s hear it. You think I’m a fool.”

“I don’t.”

“No?” Chilton spins around, keeps his eyes on his hands, which throw down two files that Matthew forgot to take back to archives: Conleth MacCailín’s and Abel Gideon’s. “You told Will Graham you’d help him find a patient this morning. One of these men?”

Matthew doesn’t ask how Chilton could know that. The main cameras had been fully operational that morning.

“The guy didn’t know what he was looking for. It was a dead-end.”

“Is that so?” Chilton’s eyes slide up to Matthew’s face, and he looks genuinely, fantastically pissed. “If I listen to tonight’s recordings, will I agree with your judgment?”

“I was going to conduct interviews in the morning. It took all day and most of the night narrowing it down to those two.”

“And yet,” Chilton muses, pressing his finger to the files splayed on the front desk, “you managed to find them at all; _these two_ caught your eye enough to be singled out. That’s hard to do without so much as a profile. I heard Will Graham tell you this morning he didn’t know anything about the man in question.”

Matthew waits, and Chilton stares him down.

“Do tell, Mr. Brown, what it was about these two patients in particular that drew your attention?”

“It’s just gut feelings,” Matthew tries to laugh.

“Like your gut feelings for Mr. MacCailín, Mr. Brown?” Chilton speaks through the chill racing down Matthew’s spine and settling in his stomach: “I’ll level with you, of course. He is a handsome, damaged individual, with a rugged sort of allure—Mr. MacCailín, that is, although I suppose,” Chilton murmurs, rounding the desk, “that is a shoe that fits Will Graham just as well as it does Conleth MacCailín.” 

Matthew keeps his mouth shut, fully aware that the ball’s been ripped out of his court.

“Listen to me very carefully, Mr. Brown.” Chilton extends the files to Matthew and stays just outside of his personal space. “I’m not going to fire you for your insubordination, which this clearly was or else you would have come to me.” He indicates the files with a nod and continues, “Besides, I don’t want to have to train somebody new in the art of wiretapping. It’s tedious work, and you do it so well, obviously.”

“What, then? Suspension?”

“Oh, no, no, no. That’d be tedious work, too, finding someone to fill in and take care of the business I usually have you carry out. No,” Chilton says again with a small shake of his head. “No, if you don’t share your findings with me I’ll have no choice but to remove Mr. MacCailín from this hospital.”

He pauses as if giving Matthew a chance to interject with a declaration of opposition. Matthew bites down on his cheek and doesn’t give him the satisfaction.

“Really, what’s the difference, he’ll be transferred to a proper prison by the end of next month anyway. I think,” Chilton taunts lightly, tapping his chin with one finger, “they might be pushing for life after all. Best case scenario he gets out in twenty years, assuming he doesn’t get brutally murdered in his cell.”

Chilton extracts Conleth’s file from Matthew’s hand and flips through it callously.

“Yes, it seems we may be unable to accommodate him further. I’m sure I could call someone in Traverse City, or maybe they’d like him back home in Wales.”

“Liverpool,” Matthew corrects him, voice about half as strong as he needs it to be.

“Hmm?” Chilton walks around his shoulder. “What was that, Mr. Brown?”

“Conleth’s from Belfast.”

“Was that before or after he lived in Liverpool?” It’s so clearly a test it makes Matthew’s blood turn cold in his veins. If he doesn’t answer it’s just as good as abandoning Conleth, just as good as refusing him.

“Before.”

Chilton hums, satisfied, and comes to stand in front of Matthew again. He points at Gideon’s file with Conleth’s still in his hand. “A life for a life, Mr. Brown?”

“I’m telling you,” he enunciates, speaking around the places in his mouth that cause him to lisp when he’s under the gun like this. “I couldn’t glean anything definitive from them.”

“But you did conduct interviews, you admit it?”

“Yes, and I’m still not sure I wasn’t missing something _else_ with the other patients.”

“I’m sorry,” Chilton chuckles, “do you lie to your mother with that mouth?”

“It’s not a lie!” Matthew insists, shoving Gideon’s file into Chilton’s hands. “It’s not. If you want to talk to them, I’ll sit in with you and ask them all the same questions, and you’ll see that there’s no way to tell what the hell we’re dealing with or if we’re even seeing it when it’s right under our noses.”

Chilton goes silent, doesn’t deflate but wilts slightly like he might go faint in the next instant. Matthew starts to turn away, thinking maybe he’s bought time, but Chilton grabs his arm and pulls him back. His grip isn’t hard and the motion isn’t quick or violent, but it still causes the files to go tumbling out of his hands.

“What did you say?”

“What?”

“You said there was no way to tell what we’re dealing with. What do you mean by that?”

Matthew takes his arm back. Chilton lets him. Their mutual silence is another test, but the power has returned to Matthew.

“Conleth stays.”

Chilton shows his palms and consents immediately. “Tell me what you know, and he stays.”

“Abel Gideon won’t talk to you,” Matthew says slowly, giving him the answer and letting it sink in before laying down his terms. “He’ll talk to Will Graham, but he won’t talk to you.”

“Why?” He’s asking why Gideon will talk to Will Graham more than he’s asking why Gideon won’t talk to him. They both know Gideon’s bored of talking to Chilton by now. “Why Will Graham?”

“I honestly have not the foggiest idea.” Matthew shakes his head. “But whatever that name Graham said to you, Gideon knew it, too.”

It’s a lie more than it is the truth, but Chilton is too desperate to believe it to question it. He makes a beeline for the door and leaves Matthew with the files on the floor. Matthew gathers them quickly, tosses them back onto the desk where he left them, and goes to follow Chilton to Gideon’s corridor. The guards pass him up on his way in and they don’t let Matthew through.

He detours to the control room and sets about switching the audio feeds back on. Chilton is right up against Gideon’s bars demanding that he tell him about someone called _Ose._

Matthew holds his breath. That had been the name.

“Will Graham came here looking for Ose,” Chilton repeats when Gideon just stares back at him blankly from his cot. “He thought _I_ was Ose, as if I were _possessed_. You _know_ something about it all. I know you do.”

“Judging by your agitation, Frederick, I’d wager you don’t know much of anything.”

Chilton huffs, deep, long breaths like he’s just been running or yelling. He sounds like he might burst into frustrated tears or scream. “Will Graham is going to come and see you, and when he does, you’ll tell him what you refuse to tell me.”

“And you’ll be listening in, is that how it works, Doctor?”

“Do you find the thought distasteful, Gideon?” He holds onto the bars and presses his face in between them. “Well, I find conspiracy theories and malicious automatism distasteful.”

The two men watch each other on the monitor. Gideon stands from his cot, back ramrod straight and hands at his sides. Chilton takes his hands and face away from the bars, but he doesn’t back away. If Gideon approached him and stuck his arms out, he could probably grab him. Matthew doesn’t think Chilton would flinch, not right now. Gideon does move forward, not far enough to reach Chilton, by Matthew’s estimations, but close enough for his exchange with Chilton to read as intimate.

“I’ll see this Will Graham of yours, but if it turns out he doesn’t know me or we don’t happen to talk about what you want to hear, then I’m afraid you’ll have to be sorely disappointed.”

“I am thoroughly prepared to be disappointed,” Chilton assures him flatly. Matthew can’t see his face on the camera, but he sounds defeated.

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick,” Gideon says, taking a step closer to the bars. “But a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”

“What if someone poisons the roots.”

“Then you replant, Doctor.”

Matthew watches for more, but Chilton leaves without another word. Gideon glances out of his cell at the ceiling for the camera where Matthew’s watching him. He winks.

Chilton’s nowhere to be seen when Matthew leaves the tiny claustrophobic room. He takes the files back down to archives and returns, exhausted, to his car.

He calls the number from before and Will Graham answers on the fifth ring.

“You’re in,” Matthew says without bothering to drop a polite greeting.

There’s an overjoyed moment of energetic silence that precedes the grateful words, “Thank you.”

“I hope he’s the one you were looking for.” Matthew shrugs, starting his car for the second time and getting the heat going. “If you wanted Ose you’re going to have to go somewhere else.”

Graham sucks in a quiet breath. Matthew’s not proud of himself for playing dirty, but no one in the ring with him fights fair. Sue him if he wants to know why he was playing detective for this guy.

“For all our sakes, it’s best that he stays where I can’t find him.”

“You’re a scary guy when you want to be,” Matthew muses, smiling even though he feels like shit. “I think Chilton’s planning on contacting Jack Crawford with the meet-up time — him or Dr. Bloom. You should know ahead of time, Chilton bugs the cells. The whole hospital is under surveillance.

“He’ll hear everything we say?”

“Yeah, you’ve got to be careful how you talk. If you don’t want him to know something, you’ll have to speak in code. Gideon always talks in circles anyway, but be ready for that.”

A bit farther from the phone Will says, “ _Do you speak code?_ ”

Lloyd tells him, “ _I’ll show you when you get off the phone._ ”

“I have to go. You’ve given me an amazing opportunity. I know what it would have cost you if it hadn’t worked out.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Matthew lies.

“I’m…will you be there, when Chilton sends for me?”

“Maybe. I’m usually around.”

“All right.”

Matthew waits, eyebrows raised. “Um, well, good night, then, Mr. Graham.”

“Good night, Matthew.”

The line goes dead. Matthew sighs, tosses his phone in the passenger seat, and throws the car into reverse to back out of his spot.

_Long Goddamn night._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life” from Proverbs 13:12


	6. He’ll Be a Friend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lloyd has a regular day with his roommate, his dog, and his boss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _He’ll be a friend and guide you / He’ll walk along with you / You’ll feel it there inside you / He’ll help you make it through_

Lloyd’s shaving in the bathroom when he hears Will walking outside the hall. It’s the big day, the one he’d heard all about from Jack when he brought Will back to Quantico from Baltimore. He opens the bathroom door and sticks his head out, face half foamy with shaving cream.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to go with you to see this Gideon guy?” Will stops at the end of the hall and turns to stare at him. Lloyd shows him the razor and explains, “I do this every morning.”

“Every morning?”

“Well, if I don’t want to look like a caveman. I can’t rock stubble, like _some_ people.”

Will rubs at his cheek with one hand. “This is stubble?”

“Sure is.” Lloyd ducks into the bathroom to rinse the razor off and set it on the edge of the sink, but Will steps into the bathroom with him and sits on the tub. They’re quiet for a beat, and then Lloyd takes up the razor again. “So yea or nay — you need me there today, give Chilton a hard time if he acts like a creep?”

“Beverly taught me how to throw a right hook.”

“Oh, did she,” Lloyd laughs. Will smiles small at him in the mirror. “Well, she’s good for that.”

“Chilton’s going to leave me alone.”

“Before or after you knock him one?”

“I don’t think I’ll have to.” Will shakes his head, looks away. “Matthew warned me that Chilton would be listening in on my meeting with Abel Gideon.”

“There are secure parts of the facility where he _couldn’t_ listen. We could see about getting you a special room so that he can’t.”

“I don’t know if it’s him yet. I don’t know if…if he’ll have anything useful to say to me.”

The mention of a value judgment catches Lloyd’s attention. He takes the opportunity to ask, “What exactly are you looking to learn from him?”

“I want to know how he survived it, ḫa-lam Supad.”

“You’re going to be careful about it, right? Remember, like we practiced.”

“Jack showed me his file, Gideon’s.” Will rubs his hands together, avoiding Lloyd’s eyes when he tries for contact. Lloyd resumes shaving while Will clears his throat to speak. “I’m going to ask about his wife’s family, why he killed them.”

“You’re actually curious, aren’t you?”

“If he’s fallen, then he’s far from God and he doesn’t know how else to be.”

“Then that’s like you,” Lloyd murmurs, rinsing the razor under the water. “Are you afraid to hear what he has to say?”

“I’m more afraid that I’m wrong about him.”

“Why?”

“Because…” Will sighs, runs his hands through his hair. “Because then I’d be alone in this.”

“In ḫa-lam Supad?”

Will smiles at Lloyd’s pronunciation. They’d worked on it Will’s first night over after dinner with Jack and Bella. “No, I’ve beaten ḫa-lam. The hunt, and the drive for it, they die out after a period of time. He’s—was dumu Aĝ, a child of Heaven.”

A watery flash of memory strikes Lloyd right behind his eyes, the same foreign words he’d heard in Saskia Ingram’s voice. Lloyd looks at Will in the mirror and finds him already watching his face for a reaction.

“I’m sorry you found out about it that way. I would have liked to tell you with words.”

“Really?” Lloyd gives him a small smile. “Beverly says you _like_ showing rather than telling.”

Dropping his eyes, Will confesses, “I do.”

“Are you blushing?”

“Yes.”

Lloyd laughs at the immediate admission and remembers Jack telling him something about Will being too open with people. It’s not a habit he wants to be the one to break. If Jack wants to do it, he can be Lloyd’s guest and go right ahead. “Hey,” Lloyd says, wiping his face dry with a clean towel, “do you think Gideon’s got any juice left? I mean, if he is an angel—or was, I guess—he’s been hospitalized for something like a year now.”

“A year and four months,” Will corrects him. He rises when Lloyd puts the razor away in the medicine cabinet. “You’re asking if he’ll have any abilities intact.”

“Will he?”

“Everyone’s different.” Will shrugs and follows Lloyd into the hallway. “I’ve heard of angels falling with no divinity left to their names. The disgrace of it, the magnitude with which some of us fall, it’s skewed all the time by any hundred things that we don’t always control.”

“So is it pretty common then, that you guys just go tumbling out of heaven? Anybody ever get a second chance?”

“It isn’t a rarity,” Will says, shrugging on his jacket. “But no one ever gets redeemed from this.”

Lloyd doesn’t ask the rest of the questions on his tongue. He just plucks Will’s glasses off the kitchen counter and hands them over. Will slides them onto his nose and holds his arms out. “Do I look presentable?”

“You look a bit like a schoolteacher.” Lloyd smiles at the blank look that earns him. “You really like all that plaid stuff?”

“Jack bought me this in New Orleans.”

“You _can_ have new clothes if you want new clothes. I’m sure Beverly would _love_ to take you to a tailor and trick you out.”

“Trick me out?” Will’s soft laugh puts a grin on Lloyd’s face. “She’s done enough for my wardrobe.”

“The jacket is cool, I’ll give you that.”

They stand in the kitchen, lingering. Winston sits dutifully by Will’s side and pants happily when Will crouches to pet him. Lloyd rolls his eyes fondly at the betrayal and gives Winston treats after Will leaves with Jack for Baltimore. He has the house to himself for about an hour before he has to leave for work, so he goes out back and throws around a Frisbee to pass the time.

His phone rings in his pocket twenty minutes before he’s due to head out, and he answers without checking the number. Wishful thinking tells him maybe someone from Quantico will be calling to inform him that he doesn’t have to come in today, so he’s actually very surprised to hear a voice he doesn’t recognize immediately.

“Good morning. My name is Dr. Misra, calling for a Will Graham?”

Lloyd stops his stammer before it happens. “He just left for a consultation with Jack Crawford. Can I give him a message for you?”

“Am I speaking with Lloyd Bowman?”

“Uh, yeah, you are.”

“Then you’re Will Graham’s guardian.”

“Well, not necessarily. He guards himself, um…”

“He’s your ward. Agent Crawford’s explained the situation to me.”

“Right, well, sure, if you say so. Just seems weird.”

“Please tell him I’m discontinuing our therapy. I can’t see him again.”

“What?” Lloyd drops the Frisbee and Winston noses at it. “But he said things were going great. He likes your approach, says you’re really competent and accepting of the supernatural. What’s—”

“I can’t see him again,” Dr. Misra repeats herself, firmly. “He is a very interesting patient with an incredible story, but I’m afraid I can’t be involved.”

“Just, wait, can he call and ask you why? He’s going to have questions. I can’t just tell him you’re dumping him cold and leave it at that. Will doesn’t operate that way. If…if there are problems, we’ll bring Jack and Dr. Bloom in, and they’ll do something to fix it. We’re all really concerned about getting him the proper care, and you’re helping him.”

“The best way for me to help him now is to refer him to someone else.”

“Dr. Misra, please.”

“I’m sorry.”

She hangs up. He stares at his phone, lost. Winston whines at his feet, ignoring the Frisbee. “I know, bud, me, too.”

Lloyd checks the time and makes another call as he’s heading for his car. Dr. Bloom answers on the fourth ring.

“Bowman? What’s wrong?”

“Well, don’t sound so disappointed that it’s not Will calling you,” he says, only half-sarcastic. “His doctor just called and gave him up. Tell me you know what the hell’s going on?”

“I…Swarna called you? When?”

“We just got off the phone, or I should say she hung up on me when I tried to plead Will’s case. She sounded pretty immovable.”

Dr. Bloom sighs. “I don’t know why she would do that.”

“Tell me you have somebody else lined up?”

“Well, I have a back-up,” she says, sounding hesitant to mention it. “I’ll call him and try to work something out so he can meet with Will before the end of the week.” She takes a breath, and he’s quiet through it. “Thank you for letting me know it happened, Lloyd.”

“You’re the only one I know who can do something about it.” He shrugs, leaning off his car door and fiddling with the keys in his hand. “I just hope this one doesn’t flake on him, too. Will really liked Dr. Misra. I don’t even know how to tell him.”

Dr. Bloom apparently is just as surprised as Lloyd is, judging by the confusion he could hear in her voice. It’s difficult for him to focus at work, busy as his mind is trying to come up with ways to soften the blow for Will once he gets home. He texts Jack at lunch when he discovers that they aren’t back from Baltimore yet and asks him how the thing with Gideon went. The verdict comes back positive. Apparently Will tagged the guy immediately and Jack spent the morning in Metcalf’s office finding a reason to get Will into a private room for his sit down with Abel Gideon.

Chilton apparently wasn’t very happy about it, but Metcalf’s great at what he does. Lloyd sends him a text with an offer for drinks this weekend, and Byron replies: _**If I need drinks to motivate me to do my job I’m a lousier attorney than you are a golfer.**_

Lloyd waits, leaning back in his chair. Another texts buzzes through.

_**Saturday, Madams Organ. You’re trying the catfish bites.** _

**You’re on.**

Byron’s suggestion gives him an idea for what to do to cheer Will up when he hears about Dr. Misra rescinding therapy. He spends the rest of the day meticulously not checking his phone at work and goes straight to Jack’s office when he hears from Jimmy that he’s finally in.

“Where’s Will?”

“He’s in Baltimore,” Jack says gruffly. His voice is a bit rough. Lloyd suspects he’s done a lot of talking today. Raising his hands when Lloyd opens his mouth to speak, Jack adds, “He’s in a secure cell. Metcalf and I ransacked the room ourselves, and it was clean. Just Will, Gideon, and an orderly keeping watch outside soundproof doors.”

“Matthew Brown?”

“Yes,” Jack Crawford sighs, dropping his face into his hands. “He offered to give Will a ride home, but I’d already enlisted Dr. Bloom for the task.”

“Well, that was kind of shitty,” Lloyd says, the thought slipping out unfiltered. He makes a chagrined face when Jack gives him a steady, cold look. “It’s an hour’s drive from Baltimore. You’re kind of putting her out.”

“So I should have put Matthew Brown out instead, is that what you’re saying?”

“If the guy offered it just seems more polite than asking Bloom to do it. I don’t know, Jack. The guy called Will that first night and he sounded kind of sweet on him. It wouldn’t hurt him to have friends outside of our niche.”

“Knowing what we know, you actually think someone with whom we aren’t familiar coming into Will Graham’s life is the best thing for him right now?”

“Will would’ve known by now if the guy was a demon or if he was like him.” Lloyd shakes his head. “Hell, he knew what Gideon was through plaster and concrete.”

“We know more about the world than what we’ve learned from our relationship with Will, Lloyd.”

_Oh._

“The guy’s an _orderly_ at a _mental hospital_ , Jack. How dangerous could he be?”

“At _Chilton’s_ hospital. He admitted to Will that he bugs the place for him and spies on his patients.”

“Matthew Brown didn’t have to warn Will ahead of time. He didn’t have to agree to helping him find Gideon _behind_ Chilton’s back. Jack, the guy’s been doing Will favors pro bono, out of pocket, even. If he wants to give Will a ride home, what’s the harm in that? It’s not like he can _do_ anything to him. Beverly taught him basic self-defense, and leaving that out, we all know where he is and who he’s with. It’d be _more_ dangerous for Brown to try anything untoward.”

Jack levels him with a solid, unblinking stare and then shrugs, at long last. “You’d better be right about this.”

Lloyd fiddles out his cell phone and texts the number Matthew Brown used to call Will while Jack calls Dr. Bloom.

**Change of plans. Can you give him a ride home after all?**

“No, we’ve made other arrangements. I’m sure, Dr. Bloom, but thank you. Oh?” Jack gives Lloyd an expectant look in between replies. “Is that so? Well, that’s very unfortunate. No, I _hadn’t_ heard about it.”

Lloyd scratches the back of his neck. _Oops._

His phone buzzes, saving him from having to do something like shrug vaguely at Jack in response.

**_Yeah I’ll bring him_ **

**Thank you Mr. Brown.**

“Well, that _is_ good news. I’m glad to hear it. What is his name?” Lloyd sits and Jack scribbles out something that’s longer than a name on his calendar. “Thank you, Dr. Bloom. I’ll pass it onto Bowman. He can tell Will when he’s done in—no, feel free, that’s perfectly all right. Okay. Thank you.”

Jack tucks his phone into his jacket pocket.

“What’s up?”

“She found someone to take Will in, though she didn’t sound very optimistic about him.”

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“A Dr. Hannibal Lecter,” Jack says with a furrowed brow. He scrutinizes the note he made on his calendar and says, “She said to read something he published a few years ago called, _Evolutionary Origins of Social Exclusion_.”

“Well, Jesus, _that_ sounds like Will.”

“Apparently, the first doctor she tried also backed out and refused to explain his reasoning.”

Lloyd watches his voice. “Will they explain if Will calls them himself? Jack, he’s going to want answers.”

“I know. We all want answers.” Jack rubs at his forehead. “I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if there was something angel- or demon-related going on with this.”

“Weird,” Lloyd concurs. “At least it worked out with Gideon, huh? What’d he say? Did you stick around to hear?”

“I stayed for the first hour, and then I couldn’t listen anymore. They started speaking all these different languages I couldn’t even pronounce. I only stayed in the first place to make sure Gideon wouldn’t try anything. You text that orderly?”

“Yeah.” Lloyd nods. “He said he’s good to bring Will home.”

Jack smiles, the expression nearly a smirk. “You like living with him, don’t you.”

“We do all right,” he concedes with a modest tip of his head. “I think I’m going to teach him to fish this weekend.”

Jack lifts an eyebrow. “At this time of year?”

“Oh, come on, Jack. You think I’d let a little ice stop me?” Lloyd smiles when Jack thinks about it and then shakes his head no. “And besides, Will likes learning the lay of the land. I can’t get him out of a tall tree until he’s climbed to the highest perch and surveyed the view.”

“No accidents?” Jack’s voice is concerned, though amusement still underlines it.

“Not climbing ones. I did pull a tick off him last week. Deer ticks pop up more frequently around the first frost, you know. He was more fascinated with the build of the thing’s jaws than anything else.” Lloyd shrugs. “Actually I think I was the more distressed party in that scenario.”

“At least it hasn’t ruined the great outdoors for him.”

“It’d take more than a bug to do the trick.”

“Has he told you about his run-in with Winston Churchill?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lloyd laughs. “He’s full of crazy angel-of-death stories.”

“He’s in good company,” Jack says, straight-faced but with a light tone that puts Lloyd at ease. He thinks Jack probably just needs time to unwind now that he’s settling down from his morning with Chilton and Metcalf and two fallen angels. “You’ve been good for him, Lloyd. Thank you.”

He smiles at Jack’s compliment, a warm feeling fuzzing in his chest. “He’s good for all of us, in different ways.”

Jack nods.

To keep the mood from growing too heavy and encumbering Jack too soon, Lloyd adds, quietly, “Sometimes he does strange things in the kitchen.”

“Has he discovered anything he likes more than chocolate?”

“He’s a big fan of Doritos _with_ chocolate.” Lloyd pushes his lips together. “And I can’t get him to lay off ice cream whenever we have some in the house. We’ve been experimenting with flavors, but it’s like heroin to him or something, especially mint chocolate chip.”

Jack chuckles. Lloyd gnaws on his lip.

“So hey, um, did Dr. Bloom say she’d tell Will about Dr. Lecter herself?”

“Yes, she did.”

“All right.”

“He’ll bounce back.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“I am right. Will’s got a doctor who’s agreed to look at him. Dr. Misra signed the NDA, so Will’s protected from her regardless of whether they have a professional relationship or not. And now he’s got someone who’s just like him who can show him how to navigate what he’s going through.”

“Abel Gideon murdered people, Jack.”

“So has Will, technically.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Will wouldn’t be on with us if he were an angel of love and good will. He’s with us because he does death like no one else, because he can see it like no one else.”

Lloyd lets that ruminate for a minute. “Did you find out what Abel Gideon was an angel of?”

Jack grimaces, taps his fingers on his desk. He mumbles, “Peaceful relationships.”

“Excuse me, what?” Lloyd sits up in his seat. “Did you say peaceful relationships? _Peaceful relationships,_ Jack.” He pauses, but he gets dead air. “Abel Gideon _murdered people_. He murdered his _wife,_ and you’re telling me he used to be the angel of peaceful relationships?”

Jack says, flatly, “If you’d heard Will explain it you wouldn’t be so surprised.”

“I think I’d be surprised anyway,” Lloyd exclaims, disbelief heavy in his voice. “Oh, my God, Jack, we can’t let him do this.”

“He’s fine,” Jack objects in his no-nonsense, no-comprises tone. “He’s got all of us covering him. Will’s better equipped for the world than Abel Gideon was. Imagine that you’ve spent your life catering to others and having no other purpose than to see them healed in their relationships. You come out of that and you’re born into a world that doesn’t help you and when you need healing the most, what you get instead is pain.”

Lloyd swallows, thinks about Abel Gideon’s file. He’d killed his wife so brutally…

“He said Katya Vitalis discovered him in a cornfield fresh after his fall when she was about ten years old. They were married for twelve of the thirty-five years that they knew each other. You know how the marriage ended.”

“How old was he when he touched down? I mean, not how _old_ , but…well, he couldn’t have looked like Will, right? He’d be a lot older now if that was the case.”

“He said he was just a kid then, didn’t look old enough to pass for an adult.”

“So, what happened?”

“Her parents were a teacher and a surgeon. They took him in, learned his story, and helped him get his feet on the ground. They raised him, essentially, sent him to medical school, and he became a transplant surgeon like the father. Came back for Christmas one year, married the girl he grew up with, and killed her, her younger brother, and Mr. and Mrs. Vitalis in 2011.”

“Christ.”

“That’s what I said,” Jack drawls. “I advise you not to do that in front of two ex-angels at the same time.”

“No kidding.”

“Look, I understand why you’d worry about Will, but he’s got it under control. It will work out better with Dr. Lecter than it did with Dr. Misra.”

“How do you know that?”

“Dr. Bloom told me he was her first choice for Will.”

“So why’d she stick him with Misra if she liked Lecter for the job all along? And why’d she still try a second doctor before going with the one she liked best?”

Jack shrugs. “She said Will chose to give the other two a shot. I guess he knows something we don’t.”

“And we think this is good news?”

“Misra and Pearce are out. Lecter has to be good news. Otherwise, we’ve got nothing.”

“Well, are we going to read this one in like we did with Misra, or how do we do it?”

“There’s a chance briefing Swarna Misra before she got to know who Will was kept her from forming a psychiatrically sound opinion of him. I’d like to at least meet with Dr. Lecter beforehand, but I want to talk to Will first and see what he thinks about it. Maybe he knows already why Misra and Pearce won’t have anything to do with his case.”

“Do you think we might all sit in and meet with this guy? Just…maybe Dr. Misra couldn’t conceptualize Will as a person with people in his life who know what he is and aren’t afraid of it.”

“Or maybe Barbas got to both of them and turned their thoughts against Will.”

“There is that,” Lloyd sighs.

“I’ll talk to Will and Dr. Bloom. She’s still working on securing a date for the meet-and-greet. Lecter might not want an audience for his first session with a new patient, but if we explain our concerns maybe he can be persuaded to make it a public affair.”

“Hell, we could just bring him to Quantico for an informal shakedown.”

“We won’t call it a shakedown,” Jack chides, giving Lloyd a stern look. “Dr. Misra’s decision doesn’t sit well with me either, but it’s her right to refer Will to someone else if she feels unable to continue therapy. And whatever she and Dr. Pearce do, our professional opinion of Dr. Lecter shouldn’t be affected by their actions.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. You know you’re right.” Lloyd nods, drops his head into his hands tiredly, and leans forward to scan the title Jack scrawled before excusing himself. He stops at the door. “What’s Gideon’s real name?”

“Kamael.”

Lloyd holes himself up in his office searching the name and Dr. Lecter’s journal article. The name yields an elaboration of what Jack already told him. Lecter’s article search yields well-written, well-argued material. Lloyd’s impressed but not satisfied just yet. He’ll wait for Will’s judgment before making a decision. He doesn’t want to be disappointed when Lecter backs out just like Pearce and Misra backed out. 

He drives home at the end of the day and feeds Winston. Will still isn’t back, so he sees to his fishing gear, making sure it’s in order and good to go for Sunday morning when Lloyd plans to take Will fishing, teach him how to bait a hook and tie a proper lure. He’s actually excited for it, amped up to be able to teach him something that nobody else in their circle can. He makes dinner for himself at eight and saves a large portion for Will. The silence gets to him a lot easier now that he’s been spoiled by Will’s company for the past two weeks.

Playing the piano helps him to block out the quiet emptiness but only for so long. At ten thirty he sends Matthew Brown a text. At eleven fifteen Matthew Brown texts him back.

_**At a gas station. We’re on our way.** _

“Damn, Will, did you talk the poor guy to death?” Lloyd mumbles under his breath.

On second thought, Abel Gideon, or Kamael, was probably thrilled for the company. He probably enjoyed having someone with whom he could speak the old languages, someone who would empathize with his situation more fully than even the humans who’d given him a home and a future ever could.

Lloyd still isn’t sure how he feels about that, about Will being around someone who’s done such reprehensible things in his lifetime. He can’t say he’s the best role model himself, but at least Will would never look at Lloyd and think it was okay to hurt other people. At least Abel Gideon is living with consequences for what he did. Will can’t overlook that there is always a price to pay for living above the rules.

He realizes, as headlights swing in through his front window, that although Will Graham might not know about government and order, Mal’ak ha-mashḥit knows all about consequences. Matthew Brown parks in the dirt drive and gets out of the car with Will. Lloyd steps outside to meet them. Winston runs out ahead of him and sniffs Matthew cautiously before running a circle around Will and standing guard.

“Hey, Will.” Lloyd waves as Will rounds the car. He turns to Matthew to shake his hand. “Thanks for bringing him. Do you want to come in for a bit? I know it’s a drive from Baltimore.”

“Ah, I’ve got to get back home. It got later than I expected.”

“I’m sorry,” Will apologizes, sounding genuinely repentant.

“No, it was…a good drive.” Haltingly, looking from Will to Lloyd and back, he manages, “Nice to clear my head after a long day, you know.”

“Yeah, I get that, completely,” Lloyd says with a smile. “Are you sure you don’t want to just step inside, maybe have a glass of water or a bite to eat? I know he kept you on your toes all day.”

Will fidgets in between them, only calm when he gets his hands on Winston’s ears.

“Uh?” Matthew looks at Will. “I don’t know, is that okay?”

“If you’d like,” Will answers softly.

Lloyd only just keeps himself from grinning at them, awkward grown men that they are. “There’s dinner in the oven if you’re hungry. Will eats like a horse, so I always make plenty.”

Matthew Brown looks tempted beyond words, but Lloyd’s convinced, and a bit disappointed, to see that it looks like he won’t take the offer. That is, until Will extends the invitation himself. “He’s right. I made your day much busier than it would have been ordinarily. Come in and eat.”

“Well, all right,” Matthew consents, voice breaking around the penultimate syllable.

Lloyd does grin when they walk up into the house ahead of him. “You guys go ahead. I’m just going to sit out here, enjoy the cold.”

Will gives him a curious glance over his shoulder followed by Matthew’s confounded one. Matthew waves Will on and waits until he walks into the kitchen before turning on Lloyd with a raised eyebrow and a question he can’t seem to voice on his lips. Lloyd just smiles calmly and says, “We aren’t.”

Matthew Brown looks both relieved and apprehensive. “Oh.”

“I don’t know if he is,” Lloyd clarifies. “But be easy with him either way. If you’re not easy with him, I have a gun.”

Matthew swallows, nods once. “He told me already that he knows how to throw a right hook, so.”

“That’s my boy,” Lloyd laughs. “Go on in then. He’s just as confused about this as you are, and you’re not making it better by standing out here talking to me.”

“Ah,” Matthew breathes around a small chuckle. “Right, um, okay.” He starts to go into the house but turns on his heels and reaches for Lloyd’s hand again. “Thanks, Lloyd.”

He smiles and shakes Matthew’s hand, watching him disappear into the house after Will. Lloyd stands, heads around the side of the house with Winston beside him, and turns on the heat lamp at the far end of the porch. He sits in a rocking chair and puts his feet up on the rail, sets his hand on Winston’s head and lazily strokes him.

“Nice out tonight, huh?”

Winston lays down where he’s sitting and Lloyd watches the night sky up above them. Somewhere up there in the vastness of the universe, many, many years ago Will was born. Within that same universe, maybe here on Earth, the one called Ose was born, too. Lloyd wonders if he’s not encouraging this thing with Matthew Brown just to allow Will the opportunity to see someone else in a way that makes his stomach churn with butterflies. He hopes something good can come from it. Lloyd’s always been very optimistic about these things.

About twenty minutes later, maybe, Lloyd hears an engine start. Will comes out back to meet him. Winston perks up at his arrival.

“That was quick.”

“We’ve had a long day. He wanted to get home.”

Lloyd nods. “Pull up a chair?”

Will does. He sits next to him and laughs when Winston sets his paws in his lap for Will to pet him.

“You are such a traitor,” Lloyd mutters, loud enough that Will could hear him even if he weren’t part Übermensch.

“He’s very fond of you,” Will argues, smiling.

“He’s fonder of you,” Lloyd sighs dramatically, lips twitching. “Matthew Brown, too.”

Will continues to smile and tilts his head to one side. “He has a tendency.”

“For fallen angels?”

“For dangerous men.”

“Well, everyone’s different.” Lloyd sinks into his chair. Will scratches Winston’s ears, and Winston yawns noisily. “Were you able to talk to Dr. Bloom at all?”

“She came by the hospital at around seven.” Will nods, a morose look coming over his face. “Dr. Misra has been thinking about this for some time.”

“So you weren’t shocked like we were?”

Will sighs. “I wasn’t shocked. I had hoped she wouldn’t go through with it.” He shrugs. “I expected Dr. Pearce to go the same way.”

“Why?”

“They’ve been having visions.” Will licks his lips and glances at Lloyd before looking down at Winston half-curled up in his lap. “Someone’s been steering them away from me.”

Lloyd swallows, doesn’t ask _why_ a second time.

“Do you know who?”

“It’s impossible to say without seeing a face or hearing a voice for myself. I’m not…demons are more evasive than angels are.”

“You couldn’t detect one the way you did Kamael.”

Will shakes his head, hands stilling on Winston’s head. “No, I couldn’t.”

“Was there,” Lloyd starts, stopping himself when he realizes he doesn’t have an articulate way to express the question burning on his tongue. “Dr. Bloom told Jack Lecter was her first choice for you but that you didn’t want him.”

“That’s true.”

“Did you have a reason?”

Will lays his head back against the chair, takes his lip between his teeth, and searches the sky. After a few seconds pass without an answer, Lloyd looks up, too, wondering if Will sees something different than he does when he looks up at all those constellations and black spaces in between.

“It’s warm out here,” Will says, quietly.

“It’s the heat lamp.” Lloyd points to it with a tip of his head.

Will turns to watch it.

“You want me to turn it off?”

“Would you mind the cold?”

Lloyd shakes his head. “No.”

He switches off the tall, bulky lamp and reclaims his seat, fingers going cold immediately without the steady pulse of heat warming the air around them. Winston shuffles out of Will’s lap and trots out to the yard and sniffs at the bits of vegetation left on the ground in between sparse tufts of dead grass and shrubbery.

“Hannibal Lecter is a giant in my cosmos.”

Lloyd turns to look at him, head still leaning back against his chair. “Like Winston Churchill?”

Will nods, eyes on the sky. They look glassy in the dark.

“Why?” It’s little more than a whisper. Lloyd can’t do anything to fix the awe in his voice.

Will shakes his head, bites back a grimace. There’s a wounded sound that stops in his throat. The shiver that ripples down Lloyd’s back doesn’t feel like a response to the creeping suggestion of the cold edging into him.

“It’s not for me to tell you.”

Lloyd doesn’t nod but only because he can’t move. The reverence in Will’s voice doesn’t allow for discussion.

“Do you want to meet him by yourself?”

He shakes his head no again and stares down into his lap, wringing his hands together fruitlessly. Will coughs a moment later, and Lloyd can see him shivering with the cold. He stands and carefully gets a hand on Will’s shoulder. “Let’s go inside.”

Will leads the way, stopping for a moment in the archway separating the kitchen from the living room. Winston comes running when Lloyd holds the door and calls for him. He locks up both doors and Will is still standing in between rooms. There’s a distracted look on his face like there’s something on the refrigerator door commanding his attention. Lloyd looks and there’s nothing there. Will’s face is flushed.

“Hey, all right?”

Will hums. “Sure, Lloyd.”

“Yeah? You look kind of blurry is all.”

“What does that mean?”

Lloyd holds the back of his hand to Will’s forehead. “For one thing, you’ve got a fever. Come on.”

Will follows him into the kitchen and takes two Tylenol with some water. He drinks the full glass and leans against the counter with a miserable look on his face.

“If you don’t want to see Dr. Lecter, Will, we’ll figure something out. You don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable.”

“It’s probably my running from the issue that set us on this path,” Will says with a dismissive wave of his hand. He washes his glass in the sink and sets it on the rack to dry with the dishes he used for his late dinner with Matthew Brown. “Much like Jonah, I’ve been brought right back to Nineveh.”

Lloyd smiles. “I have no idea what that means.”

“Jonah and the whale? Well, it was a fish—a very big fish.”

“If you say so.”

Will shrugs. “I can’t run from this anymore than I can run from my calling.”

“Kamael ran from it.”

“Kamael…” Will drops his eyes and shakes his head. “He lost his way.”

Lloyd looks away, too. He hears Winston’s claws tapping in the hallway. A bedroom door swings open on gently squeaking hinges.

“I wonder who’s bed he just stole,” Lloyd murmurs.

Will says, “He takes the floor.”

Lloyd hums around a nod. “What’d you think of Matthew Brown?”

“He’s very troubled.”

“And?”

“And he’s in love with someone worse off than even I am.”

“Oh,” Lloyd murmurs, frowning. “That’s very sad.”

“Yes, it is.” Will drops his hands by his sides. “Goodnight, Lloyd.”

“Night, Will.”

Lloyd stays behind in the kitchen a while and shuts off all the lights before going to bed. Winston starts out in Will’s room but moves back to Lloyd’s in the middle of the night. Lloyd’s glad for the company and falls asleep with no dreams there to meet him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (S1 E1: “Apéritif”): “Yes, but she also showed me, uh, your paper, “Evolutionary”…“Evolutionary Origins of Social Exclusion”?”


	7. I’ll Remember You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An old world collides with a new one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _To your arms someday I'll return to stay / ’Till then I will remember, too / Every bright start we made wishes upon / Love me always, promise always / Ooh, you’ll remember, too_

Jack Crawford comes to call on Hannibal at half past noon on a Thursday. Alana Bloom had given him adequate time to prepare, had gone through all the polite motions she would have exercised with a stranger or platonic colleague, as if they were on strictly professional terms with one another. The formalities are appreciated, of course, but Hannibal doesn’t suppose he will ever fully trust the function of duality in this age as an ingrained and expected social nicety.

He likes it just fine, naturally, and can rationalize it any number of ways, but he doesn’t trust it. There are few things about the modern world that Hannibal does trust and even fewer people he relies on to be honest with him. Alana Bloom is one of them. Jack Crawford is on his way, purely out of necessity.

“Dr. Lecter,” Jack Crawford says as he’s passing through the doorway into Hannibal’s office. A woman he’s never seen before is with him, dark-haired and modestly, fashionably dressed. Jack introduces them, marking himself as the superior agent between them. Her name is Beverly Katz. She follows Jack’s lead and stands as his shoulder, never behind him. “Thank you for meeting with us again before the trial run tomorrow.”

They’d had him in to sign papers and ask him tedious questions about his approach, his contributions to the academic community, his credentials, et cetera, and onwards. Jack asked his questions while Alana sat in with them to act as a buffer, but the general consensus as to what he must be like as a doctor was that he could not be trusted by default. He picked up on it then with only Jack running the interrogation and Alana monitoring their behavior, but the look on Beverly Katz’s face confirms his earlier unfounded suspicions.

She hadn’t been there for their first consultation, but there was a feeling of being watched all along. He would not doubt if she and others had been listening. It made him ravenously curious to know if their mutual concern, Will Graham, had seen him, heard him speak, recognized him…

No, if he had, there would have been hell to pay right then and there. Jack Crawford would not be wasting their time now with formalities.

“Of course.” Hannibal tips his head and closes the door. “Dr. Bloom informed me that FBI involvement would be requisite to whatever arrangements I make from here on out, where Will Graham is concerned.”

“It’s more us than it is the FBI,” Beverly corrects him, the interjection very appropriately timed.

“You have a personal interest vested in him then,” Hannibal surmises aloud when Jack nods his head in agreement with Beverly Katz’s statement.

Carefully and officiously, Jack provides, “There are very unique circumstances surrounding his case that we didn’t have time to discuss the first time we met in my office.”

Purposely guessing incorrectly, Hannibal wagers, “The shooting in New Orleans?”

“Less about the Croix Tueur case, more about how our paths crossed in the first place,” Jack explains.

Beverly raises her chin next to him so that Hannibal knows to brace himself for radical statement. She says, “When he dropped out of the sky in that freak lightning storm.”

This time Jack does turn a sharp look on Beverly when she speaks. She doesn’t shrug, but the emotion that accompanies a shrug is there on her face when she stares back at him. It’s replaced with sturdy determination when it’s turned back toward Hannibal. He feigns confusion.

Slow with his words he asks, “Do you mean to say he jumped off of a building?”

Jack sighs and gestures to the chairs in the middle of the floor. “May we sit?”

“Yes, please,” Hannibal gushes, as if just remembering himself and his role.

He moves his chair next to Beverly’s and brings another for himself from the far wall. It says something that they chose a middle ground rather than the pair of seats already at Hannibal’s desk. This exchange will be a meeting of equals, then. Good, Hannibal thinks. It’s about time he got back into the swing of working on an even playing field. They need to think that’s what they have with him, anyhow. _They_ need to believe he will fight fairly—that there is no other way he could possibly engage with them.

“I understand there was a problem with Mr. Graham’s previous therapist,” he offers, pressing his tie to his chest as he sits. “Dr. Swarna Misra, a very good psychiatrist by all accounts.”

“She decided it was going to put too much of a strain on her workload,” Beverly answers flatly.

Hannibal looks at her and then at Jack. Neither of them speaks. After a moment more of this suspense, Hannibal clears his throat. “Was there a specific reason for your summoning me today, Agent Crawford, or had you thought I would gossip with you about a colleague?”

Jack replies on rote, “Dr. Misra has been forthcoming enough with us as to her reasons for ending therapy with Will Graham.”

“Forthcoming enough,” Hannibal repeats, allowing a slow pause to slink between them. “As much as I appreciate the drama, agents, I must ask that you be direct with me where my patient is concerned. Say what you mean. I will show you the same courtesy.”

Beverly looks away from Hannibal and holds Jack’s eyes for a slow count of five. They’re wary of him. Will Graham’s bad luck with the first two therapists—Hannibal was only meant to know of the first one—had made them skeptical of finding a decent, reliable character in him. It’s an offensive prejudice, but somewhere beneath that apprehension, maybe, there lays a gut feeling that is entirely of their own judgment.

Hannibal is thankful, in this case, for the distraction of their bias. It’s a shroud, a common disguise hiding him in plain sight. They will dismiss their reluctance to trust him as rudeness, and anything that runs deeper will be promptly discarded as erroneous. He adores duplicity and the strength of properly stoked cognitive dissonance.

“Dr. Lecter, at the beginning of this week I had you in my office to sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding your therapy with Will Graham.”

“You did, yes.”

“Now normally we would have given you the full breakdown of facts right there on the spot, but there was a medical emergency we had to oversee.” Jack pauses, gives his eyes briefly to Beverly. “It involved Will Graham.”

A lurch in Hannibal’s stomach nearly throws him out of his chair. The last time Will Graham suffered a “medical emergency” in Jack Crawford’s care, he had been shot. Fallen angels suffer as a fact of life, generally. They are cast out for wretchedness, punished harshly, and thrown, potentially, to their deaths at the hands of men and devils alike. For a while Hannibal had given him a touch that was not headed by pain or cruelty, and Will had paid the ultimate price for receiving him. They had both paid it, for many, many years.

That was when they had been Ose and Mal’ak ha-Mashḥit, solely—no aliases and no assumed identities. Something in Hannibal’s face gives away his distress, not the full, wrenching depth of it, but enough for Jack to show him his palms. The look on his face is surprised, mildly. “He’s all right. It was just a scare. The doctors who looked at him didn’t find anything. They think he was just dehydrated.”

 _Where did they look?_ Hannibal doesn’t ask. _What does God’s vengeance look like on an MRI scan? Does it manifest as a tumor or leukemia or SLE?_

“Why was I not informed?”

“He wasn’t fit to take on a new doctor then. We didn’t think introducing you that way would have been ideal for either of you, and before you take him on as an official patient, you aren’t obligated to oversee his medical crises.”

Speaking calmly and evenly around boiling disappointment, Hannibal asks, “Is he unable to begin therapy at this point in time?”

“He’s ready now.” Jack nods his head. “The question we’ve been hammering out since the…intervention…was whether or not to inform you of those circumstances we mentioned before.”

Hannibal waits, disbelief slowly filtering across his features. “The intervention.”

“Yes,” Jack says, followed by a meaningful look.

Hannibal exercises a modicum of self-control to keep himself from sneering at the agents across from him and pretends to put the pieces together, going through the motions slowly in his mind: _Dropped out of the sky, intervention, angels, angels…_

“Would you have me believe that his sudden collapse was the work of divine intervention?”

Jack gives him a stone-faced look. “Yes.”

He doesn’t scoff, but he does drop his chin, the implication clearly being, _Perhaps you are the one who needs therapy, Agent._

“Look, I didn’t think it was worth it trying to explain Will’s situation to _another_ psychiatrist that we don’t know,” Beverly cuts in, interrupting the icy, thoroughly unimpressed looks Jack and Hannibal are giving one another. The distrust runs very deeply for them, or perhaps it’s their protectiveness over Will Graham that drives her to overthrow roundabout geniality for naked honesty. “So we aren’t going to explain.”

Jack turns to slide his gaze to Beverly. Very nearly a question, he says, “We aren’t.”

“No.” Beverly stands, and then Jack stands. Hannibal waits a moment to watch the pair of them before rising himself. “You’re meeting him tomorrow night. In the NDA that you signed on Monday, you agreed to be there and concurrently gave your consent for all of us to be there with you.”

“As they were when I signed, those terms are acceptable,” Hannibal says with a lilt at the end, indicative of a question.

“Whether you believe him or whether you think _we’re_ crazy for believing him, all of it happened. And even if it didn’t, even if we hadn’t seen it for ourselves, it doesn’t change that he’s a person with needs to be met and wounds to be healed. If you can’t see that after just talking with him, then you’re not the one we want anyway.” She pauses, her words catching up to her and flooding her face for a second with nervous embarrassment. It’s reined in quickly enough for her to say, with clarity and sincerity, “He’s one of us.”

Hannibal does not tell her that she is wrong on two counts, that Will Graham is neither one of them nor one of his own breed. He just blinks and says with genuine steadfastness, “Whatever Dr. Misra’s reasons were for rescinding therapy, I have no intention of backing away from his case.”

“Shake on it.”

“Beverly,” Jack warns, coming to stand between them, putting himself ahead of her for the first time through the duration of their visit. “We said we weren’t going to do this.”

“Well, I’m doing it,” she contradicts him, never once looking away from Hannibal.

A beat passes between them without either one dropping their straight stare. He takes her hand, a challenge acknowledged and accepted. She doesn’t release him even after the bond is sealed. Hannibal decides he likes her, manners aside. Fear does, after all, make people rude.

He holds her eyes for a few seconds longer, hoping to communicate that he admires her candor. It’s a refreshing break from the monotony of propriety and levelheaded civility of everyday interaction. As a deep red mist fills the apples of her cheeks and she removes her hand from his grip, he recognizes the element in her that he enjoys so much: passion, pure and simple.

Taking his time to drag his eyes away from her to Jack he says, calmly, “Was there anything else, agents?”

“No, Doctor, that’s plenty.” Jack bows his head, a hand dropping to Beverly’s back. It’s a cue for them to leave. “We’ll let you know if our plans need revision.”

Hannibal tips his chin and intones, with a small, companionable smile, “I sincerely hope it will not come to that.”

Jack waves Beverly ahead when they get to the exit for a word alone with Hannibal. Without any complaint, she jogs down the steps to wait for him on the sidewalk, doing nothing to occupy herself but turn and stare out at the parking lot. Hannibal decides he likes Beverly Katz quite a lot.

Jack turns to Hannibal, dropping his voice. “I’m sorry we came on so strong. We’ve had a hell of a time getting anyone to agree to come and see him.”

Confidentially, sounding more curious than he is, “There were others, after Swarna?” 

“Only one, and then you.”

“It’s distressing when the system fails us,” Hannibal offers, lending reason to Jack and his colleague’s concerns. “Those who fall through the cracks often need our help the most.”

Jack looks relieved. His shoulders sink with it. “Yes,” he says, “that’s it, exactly.”

Hannibal nods. “I will see this special investigator of yours. If he will have me, then you need look no further.”

It remains unspoken how badly Jack wishes for that not to be the case, how badly he wants Hannibal to stick, how badly another disappointment would wound Will, and how it would wound all of them for Will to be hurt yet again. He leaves to rejoin with Beverly Katz on the street, and the two walk for their car. Hannibal eases the door shut and listens with his shoulders pressed into the wood.

“A little warning would have been nice, Beverly.”

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly, meaning it. “I was just thinking about the look on Will’s face when you told him we were bringing Dr. Lecter in to sign the NDA, like he _knew_ this one was going to flake on him just like Misra and Pearce did.”

“We don’t know anything about what Will’s experience with him will be like. I _told_ you it was too soon to pass judgment.”

The car unlocks. One pair of footsteps stops abruptly, and the other follows the first’s lead.

“I was angry, okay? I _am_ angry. We bring Will to work with us, and he gets shot; this stuff with Lounds and Saskia Ingram happens, and the next thing we know, there’s somebody called Barbas stalking us, only she’s one step ahead of every move we make—”

Jack hushes Beverly in time with the chill creeping down Hannibal’s spine.

_Impossible._

“You’ve got to be careful how you talk about that in public.” Hannibal imagines Jack Crawford looking around them. Footsteps tell him Jack is rounding the car to stand with Beverly Katz. “We’re all upset. This whole thing’s been spiraling out of control since we dug him out of that hole in the ground.”

She sighs, irritably correcting him, “It’s been spiraling for a lot longer than that.”

Hannibal’s hands sweat.

_No._

If they know of Barbas’ name, then surely they could know of his as well. It was shocking enough hearing his name fall from Chilton’s lips, pronounced perfectly, if a touch embellished by his accent and very minor lisp.

He’d _seen_ to Chilton’s memories, gone in and toyed with them himself, stubborn as they were. Barbas left him with cobwebs; Hannibal dusted them clean and then sprayed the corners with a hose.

They know Barbas, they know Mal’ak ha-Mashḥit, they know Ose…

No, they know _of_ those names. They’ve heard the stories, and perhaps they’ve seen the flashes of the expansive mind their Will Graham kept hidden behind blue-gray eyes. They could have seen it all, but they would never know the man who was dumu Aĝ. They could never know all of Barbas’ corporeal tricks or comprehend Ose’s mastery over the delicate art of insanity.

Humans would never know. They could not.

Hannibal sends Alana a text at the end of the workday, bored and impatient with the long disquiet doing nothing to hold him over until tomorrow. That’s when it happens, when they’ll see each other again at long last. He’s waited hundreds of years. Twelve hours more doesn’t faze him.

He paces in his library at home, restless.

The time left does faze him; its slow drain of seconds ebb slowly, so slowly, following the rhythm of an ever-receding tide. Alana answers his text with a dismissal, gently refusing to give him more information about Will Graham. His anxiety reads as trepidation at Swarna Misra’s withdrawal from the case, he knows, though that much is not expressly stated in his message to her. She tells him not to worry, that Will Graham is just a man. He and Hannibal are both just men.

It takes restraint he almost doesn’t have not to crush the device in his hand.

_Have you told him that’s what you think of him, that he’s just a man? I suppose you’d think it a great honor, high praise. You think all creatures want to be human, that there’s something validating about the attachment of humanity to screaming red meat. You think you’re the same as he is, as I am. You aren’t. You **aren’t**._

He goes into the pantry, and then he goes downstairs into the cellar. There’s an accountant half-dead missing her tongue and a kidney rigged up in the middle of the floor, a Mrs. Saccomanno. Time continues to drag, but at least he isn’t sitting on his hands.

She makes miserable sounds, but she doesn’t scream. Madness is born so easily from despair, and he spins madness freely, sweetly, harshly, spins it so they don’t know their salvation from their chains. In all his years plundering the human race for whatever gems and ivory he could unearth of blood and bone he has never tired of the sight. Her shiny red organs look just like a sunrise shivering off an impassive, torrential ocean.

It’s good fun working on her. They’ve been at it for two days now.

The sun rises to find him with blood saturating the clear material of his protective suit. Mrs. Saccomanno convulses, but her body refuses to let her die yet. He leaves her for the sink, scrubs his nails, his hands, his wrists. Upstairs he takes a shower, dresses in a lovely suit, and combs his hair. As an afterthought, he switches out his tailored ensemble for a soft vest and matching jacket. He abandons the tie and leaves his suprasternal notch exposed under an opened button. He teases stray strands out of his perfectly groomed coiffure and leaves the house. 

Quantico is nearly an hour away. He stops for gas and arrives at the FBI academy where Jack Crawford is set up twenty minutes early. He sits in his car in the parking lot with the windows rolled up and the keys crushed in his hands, leaving imprints and the smell of copper smeared into his palm.

 _Seven hundred years,_ he whispers in that part of him that used to be Hannibal Lecter, the boy. _Seven hundred years, seven hundred…_

A knock comes at the window. He blinks out of the treacherous past and allows his body language to show that he’s startled. Alana is looking in through his window, a soft smile on her face. She steps back to give him room to open the door, and he does so, pensive as he locks the door behind him and tucks the keys into his pocket.

“You look nervous,” she says, smile gone from her lips but present in her eyes. It isn’t said to tease.

“Should I be?”

They watch each other for a moment, and she says, with a small headshake, “No.”

Hannibal looks up the crowded parking lot and then back at her. He manages a congenial smile and angles his head. “Then we should go.”

Her smile returns, open and honest and kind, none of the duplicity there or in her demeanor. She isn’t afraid of him, and she isn’t afraid of Will Graham. Her faith in them soars and beats like a live, gushing heart. Everything about Alana is like the heart, strong and pivotal and life-giving. She’s good. It’s no wonder he’s so fond of her. Mal’ak had been that way in their stolen time that spanned less than a childhood and more than a birth.

As they’re climbing the concrete steps, he observes, with counterfeited tranquility, “You’re confident that I will meet his expectations.”

“You were my first choice for Will,” she says, just as casually.

“Jack told me.”

Her steps falter, but she recovers quickly and keeps up with him. A faint blush of red creeps up beneath the line of her jaw, and the smile on her face bears a touch of defiance that has been an aspect of her personality for as long as he has known her. Evenly, “He shouldn’t have.”

“He asked not to be referred to me,” Hannibal clarifies, directing the conversation back to Will Graham. He uses same tone she did, hiding his affronted airs very well.

“For what it’s worth, his decision was tied to his issues, not yours.”

“Oh?”

“Those issues we’ll discuss today,” she reminds him. Stopping outside of Jack’s office door, she turns to Hannibal and says, dropping her voice and pinning him with her eyes, “He hasn’t told me why he didn’t want to see you. I didn’t ask.”

“Thank you. I should like to discover for myself.”

She drops her eyes, a haphazard smile ghosting over her face for just a second. His curiosity strengthens her belief in him, in his ability to keep Will Graham where others abandoned him. There’s something that wants to be spoken in the spaces between her accidental expression of relief and her hand reaching to open the door, but as soon as the office is revealed to him, everything else falls away, disintegrates, and is gone.

He’s there, _just there_. One of his humans has dressed him in blue plaid and unthreatening khaki. They almost match in their banality, the two of them. The irony makes Hannibal want to cry. He makes that the only reason his  
heart feels fit to beat out of his chest.

Several other people are in the room with them. They’re all looking at him, except for Will Graham. He’s standing at one corner of Jack’s desk looking at a map with red strings and photographs pinned to it. From Hannibal’s place by the door he can see that it’s a map of Minnesota and that the victims are entirely female with long brown hair.

Jack steps forward to shake his hand. He does a head count, naming Lloyd Bowman, Jimmy Price, and Brian Zeller. Beverly Katz waves for herself from her place at Will’s shoulder. Alana sits down near the door in a chair against the wall, followed by Bowman in the pale tan armchair beside her and Price and Zeller on the opposite wall. Beverly nods at Jack’s look and stands with him on the other side of his desk, leaving Jack’s chair and the two across from it unoccupied.

It’s terribly crowded, even for a fairly sized office. The room could hold many more people comfortably, but as each person finds a seat and no one speaks, Hannibal can’t help but note the strangeness of it. He hasn’t moved from his place by the door. Will Graham hasn’t acknowledged him yet.

Hannibal takes it upon himself to cross the room, taking the chair farthest from Will and closest to Jack and Beverly. As he’s settling in his seat and the breeze he brought with him rests, he catches a scent on the air. He turns his head to follow it, noting the source and the particular chord that he’s encountered dozens of times in this life alone. It clings onto the wisps of Will Graham’s incidentally curled locks and to the roots sunken into his scalp, deeper in the bone arena of his skull where the blood runs hotter than it would have if were not afflicted with the sweetness Hannibal smells on him.

It had never been an interest of his to taste, not before. He presses his hand down the front of his shirt and counts to ten before pointing a patient look at Jack and saying, “Perhaps I should come in again.”

“My name is Will Graham,” _he_ speaks.

Annoyed at himself and repressing a clumsy shiver, Hannibal faces forward to give _Will Graham_ his profile. A second ticks by, and he turns to see him, eyes the same unpredictable variation of blue, mouth turned down in the same unhappy line, the same dark hair concealing the unblemished mound of his forehead. He looks as he did the day they were separated.

“Hello, Will,” Hannibal says, moderating his voice so he doesn’t sound breathless with the fluttering in his lungs.

“Hello, Dr. Lecter.”

“Would you like to sit down?”

“Not particularly,” Will admits, flicking his eyes away. They’d been missing Hannibal’s for the most part anyway, frustratingly. He takes the seat on the other side of Jack’s desk, further establishing that this space is his for the duration of their meeting.

“Jack tells me there are things for us to speak about, before our professional relationship can advance beyond the experimental stages.”

“What would you like to know?” Will drawls, sounding every bit as doubtful as Alana did hopeful.

Hannibal licks his lips, crosses his legs, and laces his fingers together as he slides into his role as therapist. “I’d like to know if the breach of privacy you experienced at Interim LSU has given you a lingering sense of violation.”

Will does look up at him then, eyes jumping to his directly, lost and confused and hungry for an answer. For a moment, Hannibal thinks Will sees him, sees what he is, though he’s doing everything he can to hide. It’s a struggle. It hurts him, stirs nausea in his gut, and makes his head spin.

“Dr. Lecter has a limited understanding of your condition.” Jack severs the link between their gazes with his voice. Will looks at the map on the wall, flushed, beautifully, up the side of his neck. “Maybe it would move things along if you explained it for yourself.”

“I don’t require an explanation,” Hannibal interrupts Jack’s suggestion. When Will turns and lands his eyes on Hannibal’s throat without making any attempt to score higher, Hannibal turns his eyes back on Jack in a gesture of mercy. “Perhaps Dr. Misra did not earn the truth she squandered as you and your people have earned it. I would advise you not to make the mistake of doling out his confidence again before it is adequately paid for.”

Beverly straightens out, shoulders relaxing a bit from their minutely defensive stance. Jack considers Hannibal’s offer, glances at Will, and raises his eyebrows, a question. Hannibal glances around at the room of people watching him, fixing him with more scrutiny than Will Graham dares to do for himself. They have varying opinions of him that he doesn’t need to scrape beneath the surface of their expressions to decipher.

Alana respects his choice. Lloyd Bowman likes what he’s offering and why. Brian Zeller is wary of him. Jimmy Price wants to hear Will’s say on the matter. Beverly and Jack are on the fence but eager to skip over the part of Will’s past that allegedly led Swarna Misra and Jeffrey Pearce to reject him.

“It didn’t bother me,” Will says, and Hannibal takes his time bringing his eyes back to an acceptable place for conversation.

That old, familiar voice makes his skin buzz and thrum, and he’s sure now, where he wasn’t before, that his identity has not been parsed out. There is _something_ to him that makes Will afraid of him, afraid of being near him, but Hannibal’s at a loss for what it is. He’ll take the prize of spoken words after so many silent years if the price is a disadvantage of information. Will can’t read him, and Hannibal can’t read Will, not completely.

 _Mal’ak and Ose_ , Hannibal thinks with a quiet thrill burning under his skin and in his blood. _The pair of us playing the old game, again._

“Do you feel that it comes with the territory?”

“I’m just used to the intrusion,” Will answers quickly, eyes flicking to Jack and Beverly and then dropping to his lap. “When someone tries to peek behind the curtain it’s usually because they’re impatient to know how things are going to end, or because they want to make sure it’s set to go off without a hitch.”

Hannibal elaborates, “Avid fans and directors, no middle ground in between.”

“I haven’t had much luck with the middle ground in my life.”

“The gray areas separating the black from the white can be difficult to navigate.” Hannibal tips his head, uncrossing his legs and sitting up straighter. He asks, airily, “Does the gray allow the two to mingle at a point, or does it stand in for the one spot on the spectrum that we ever feel comfortable enough to touch?”

“Why wouldn’t we want to touch the white?”

“Why not the black?” Hannibal counters easily, allowing himself to smile small at the bemused furrow in Will’s brow. “You yourself have touched it.”

Will’s eyes dart up to his chin, not willing to chance meeting his gaze full-on again. “Have you?”

“Yes,” Hannibal answers, solemnly enough to communicate truth but lightly enough not to give himself away.

Immediately their conversation takes on the nature of a private consultation. Hannibal can feel it in their banter, how the observers at his back and to his left fade into the static and leave him with Will, unadulterated, uncensored. But of course, they are both censored. They are both perpetuating Hannibal’s ignorance of who Will truly is, though Will obviously isn’t aware that Hannibal has any knowledge of the fact already.

It churns the unhappiness welling inside of him like a stomach flu flaring out and touching everything with sickness, but Hannibal is, by nature, an addict for pain. He loves the fever of it, the rush of it, whether he’s causing it or whether it’s being done to him. As much as it ever hurts, his most distraught, agonizing memories have remained among the brightest in his mind. Mal’ak is his most vivid memory, has always been his most ecstatic, brilliant dying star.

Jack Crawford is pleased after about fifteen minutes of chatter, pleased that Will doesn’t lose himself and pleased that Hannibal doesn’t pressure him into revealing an uncomfortable, unflattering truth. The gradual cessation of Will’s discomfort radiates out of him in the form of soft, unbroken relief, gratitude, and against Hannibal’s sincere warning, trust.

Hannibal thought Jack would have trained that lovely, ill-advised quality out of Will by now, but apparently not. He thinks he should like to prepare Jack a feast of something extravagant to repay him for such a kindness. Right about when Hannibal revives the topic of Will’s shooting, Jack steps forward and places a warm, relaxed hand on Hannibal’s shoulder.

“There’ll be time for it in therapy, Doctor.”

Across the desk, Will’s shoulders sink and his eyes droop half-closed. He had expected their meeting to go over far less spectacularly than it had, which is no understatement in the slightest. Will engaged with him, kept up with him, tracked his thought patterns, pushed out emotion, probably unintentionally, and gave him back hesitant but participatory coyness, bordering only just on this side of coquettishness. 

Will is eager for this arrangement to work. Where he was reluctant and even afraid, it’s been replaced by an even stronger sense of determination that Hannibal genuinely can’t place. In any case, he won’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Will would have him for a therapist. Hannibal would have him for a patient.

They would spends hours over a period of weeks just this month speaking together, alone together, and they would play their game, their old game that had brought them together in the first place. Will would be looking for Ose all the while and would fail to see him again and again every time he looked at Hannibal, just like old times, just like it was in the beginning.

“I’m very happy to hear it,” he says, perfectly, hilariously, tragically honest. Will stands, eyes averted, and Hannibal stands, too.

The other occupants in the office with them begin to shuffle out, needing to cater to other official business, perhaps. Alana goes with them to wait politely outside the door. Will rounds the desk toward Jack and Beverly and gives the latter a reassuring smile that is promptly returned. Beverly lingers there a moment and then flicks her gaze to Hannibal before coming around the chairs and reaching to take his hand. “I’m sorry I was harsh on you before.”

Hannibal smiles. “Are you?”

“Yes,” she says, assessing him with cool, flat eyes. “I underestimated you.”

Jack walks around them with Will for the door. Through the glass Hannibal can see Alana laughing at something Lloyd Bowman says to her.

“You were being critical, for the sake of protecting your friend.”

The line of her mouth is soft but firm. She nods once and takes her hand back. “He doesn’t need me to protect him.”

“That doesn’t mean you won’t.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she cedes, finally sounding more accepting of him. Softly, highly invested in his answer but taking no caution to drive it, “Now’s the time to back out.”

“Yes, it is.”

When the moment passes and leaves them squared off with the promise he made yesterday fulfilled, she smiles, beatifically. “I won’t ask you to shake on it.”

“That would be redundant,” he says with a cheerful smile of his own. It’s predominantly unfiltered, though it’s not entirely the whole of him sparking through and tasting the atmosphere of the room. Even in the company of people who cannot see him for what he really is it would be too great of a risk to show himself here.

He turns for the door after her to find Will standing there just dragging his eyes away from Hannibal’s face. It would have gotten Barbas caught, but not Ose.

Beverly touches Will’s arm on the way out and leaves them alone in the office, together. The quiet seeps into Hannibal’s bones. He trembles with anticipation, watching Will expectantly and tamping down every wild, burning desire tumbling deep inside of him. He glances out through the glass walls again, thick enough to keep the noise out, thin enough not to look like proper walls. Alana and Lloyd Bowman have wandered a ways from the door; Jack has gravitated towards Katz, and the two are conversing. Price and Zeller have gone to a different part of the building.

They’ve been allowed a moment, an aside. Hannibal slides his eyes back to Will’s face, alert, welcome, deceptively open. “Not fond of eye contact, are you?” Hannibal muses, aiming for buoyancy and instead tapping into a warm kind of intimacy he doesn’t mean to give away.

Will notices the hum of his voice moving through his chest, dragging almost with painful familiarity. It’s not _his_ voice, but there’s a trace of it on him, that blur that invades _Ose’s_ regular speech by default. It isn’t recognizable on its own. Set apart from everything else it’s almost incoherent, out of place, but the smattering of red across _Will’s_ nose tells him it stands apart for another, entirely different reason that he explains: “Jack’s been trying to get me to show less.”

An ugly pang of something like affronted anger blooms in Hannibal’s heart, right in the center of his pounding, invigorated human heart. A second later it’s replaced by genuine amusement, at which Hannibal smirks. “He isn’t succeeding.”

“No.” A smirk settles on Will’s lips, too, and Hannibal remembers, he _remembers_ , all the ways he taught and learned and worshipped that mouth. “But he’s trying.”

“Effort should be rewarded just as much as results.”

Will’s smirk widens into a smile, and he meets Hannibal’s eyes. His hand extends, and Hannibal looks down, at first bewildered and then panicked. He swallows, takes the offered hand, palm sliding over Will’s fingers, the back of his hand smooth under his fingertips, soft, warm, ancient, alive, _returned to him, at last._

Something passes, shifts in the air, and he feels the moment his face flickers. A memory dives under his skin almost as a reflex, sinks its teeth and claws into his organs, forces him to relive that day, the water rushing up into the sky like a wind tunnel and the people of the city screaming at the gods’ supposed displeasure, and he himself crying out like a wild animal in pain. Will crushes Hannibal’s hand in his grip, and his eyes are wide as saucers when Hannibal can bear to look at him.

He squeezes back, aware of his face and cautious of the people outside who can become witnesses to what is happening between them at any moment. Concern that he doesn’t feel transforms his face, confusing Will and nearly taking him out of his shock. He doesn’t have time to react to the first caress or the second. By the time the third one flicks at the inviting well of his mind, he can’t escape. His brain, already infected, succumbs, gives him the bodily reaction that Hannibal wants.

It’s as Will is whispering, urgently with a frantic look about his face, “Ose,” that Hannibal steps away from him. Will’s fingers jerk and grasp at his hand, light tremors mixing into the electric currents breathing and moving through his muscles. His mouth gasps and his eyelids flutter. Lips pulling back into a deep frown, he breathes, voice breaking, “Don’t, please.”

“I have missed you, Akh,” he whispers back, frowning just as deeply and giving him one last glimpse of his countenance, a parting kiss, a lingering touch to last them both.

He makes a small show of feeling Will’s forehead for a temperature and checking his eyes, making every touch of their skin count, committing it all to memory and breaking his heart anew. The door opens.

Alana rushes in to his side. “What is it?”

“He’s had a mild seizure,” Hannibal says quickly, but with deliberate calm. She immediately helps move Will into one of Jack’s armchairs. “Was he given an MRI scan, at Interim LSU or following his medical emergency here?”

Jack strides in, hearing the question. “No. What’s wrong with him?”

“I’ll call an ambulance,” Alana says, already taking out her phone.

“Has he been feverish lately? What were his other symptoms the day of his collapse?”

Jack is watching Will, pensive. He confirms, “He had a fever.”

“Were there other seizures or hallucinations that you know of?”

“I don’t know if they were seizures,” Jack murmurs, shaking his head. “Sometimes he would…he’d just stare off and I couldn’t get him back for a minute or two, but that was part of…”

“Part of what?” Alana asks, angling the phone away from her mouth but holding with the 9-1-1 operator. 

Jack asks her, avoiding the question, “Were you aware that he had hallucinations?”

“What?”

Lloyd walks in, having been waiting with Beverly by the door. “What’s going on? Is he all right?”

“You said you pulled a tick off him,” Jack says, rounding on him.

“I…yeah, when he first came to live with me, the first week.”

Hannibal looks at Alana. She says, “Hallucinations, seizures, fever. Do you think it could be an infection of the brain?”

Turning to Jack, Hannibal says, still fortifying his role as doctor with a directive, clinical tone voice, “Have his doctors give him an MRI scan when he gets to the hospital.”

Jack nods, and Beverly rushes into the room, drops into a crouch at Will’s side as he begins to stir. Hannibal can hear the low wail of an ambulance far off. There’s sweat on Will’s forehead and in his hair. Hannibal’s sorry about it. He would reach out to him and make it better if it didn’t mean the end for both of them, for everyone in the room with them.

Will blinks his eyes open and slurs a question. Hannibal breezes out into the hallway and out the front doors to meet the medics when the ambulance arrives. He waits with his hands balled up into shaking fists in his pockets and his teeth clenched tightly enough to irritate his jaw. Tears prick at his eyes, angry and hopeless and frenzied.

The footsteps behind him are Lloyd Bowman’s. He’s out of breath. Hannibal doesn’t look at him, but he can hear the frightened despondency, the self-blame in his ragged, steadily evening breaths.

“None of the others detected it either,” Hannibal says in the way of reassurance.

“They weren’t living with him,” Bowman grits out, swiping the back of his sleeve over his face. “They weren’t feeding him anti-pyretics in the middle of the night when he woke up, drenched and terrified and burning up a storm…” 

The sirens grow nearer. Hannibal feels the grief and rage ease out of him with the proximity of Bowman’s utter devastation. He turns toward him, keeping his eyes down. “You saw enough of his illness for us to see the rest of it. It could have become much worse than it was.”

They stand, facing the street. Bowman leads the EMTs inside, and Hannibal waits near the ambulance for them to bring Will out. He’s unsteady, but his feet hold him. As he walks for the vehicle his eyes stay on Hannibal’s, searching, desperate, and starved. Hannibal gives him nothing. He is the devil. He is smoke. The humans following him out don’t look at him differently. Will didn’t tell them. He didn’t use his few seconds of clarity to give Hannibal up.

He climbs into the ambulance, and Beverly goes with him, leaving Bowman on the sidewalk holding his hands behind his head. Jack touches his shoulder. Alana watches the ambulance go. Hannibal watches it, too.

It isn’t a wind tunnel, but it gives him an identical ugly feeling of emptiness right in the middle of his chest. They’d touched, and Will was going to keep Hannibal’s secret, for right now, until he could grasp it better, until he knew what he was meant to do with it. Hannibal will have to prepare for his decision. Much has changed, but too much has stayed exactly the same for him to hope things can be any different than they were the last time.

A voice not his own whispers inside of him, _Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life._

Hannibal is darkness. Mal’ak is sunlight. A tree can live in the space of their convergent gray.

He quashes that hope and excuses himself from the assembly on the front steps of the FBI academy to make for his car. About twenty minutes out from Quantico he parks on the side of the road and holds his head in his hands.

He’d touched his whole world today. He would never have more than a touch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (S1 E9, “Trou Normand”): “Fear makes you rude, Will.”  
>  Originally from Harris’ _Red Dragon_ , page 13: “Fear sometimes made him rude.”
> 
> From S1 E4, “Oeuf”: “Passion’s good. Gets blood pumping.”
> 
> From Harris’ _Red Dragon_ , page 20: “In the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved.”
> 
> From page 122: “He had signed it ‘Avid Fan.’”
> 
> From S1 E1, “Apéritif”: “Not fond of eye contact, are you?”
> 
> From S1 E 11, “Rôti”: “He’s had a mild seizure.”
> 
> From S2 E 5, “Mukozuke”: “He is the devil, Mr. Graham. He is smoke.”
> 
> “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life” from Proverbs 13:12


	8. I Forgot to Remember to Forget

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team waits for Will to wake up from a medically induced coma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The day she went away / I made myself a promise / That I’d soon forget we’d ever met / But something sure is wrong / ‘Cause I’m so blue and lonely / I forgot to remember to forget_

Will’s been out for a month, three weeks, and four days when Zeller sees Freddie Lounds on his floor chatting up a nurse. He catches her arm mid-stride and hauls her off out of the way of foot traffic into a neighboring corridor.

“Brian,” she greets him, smiling in such a way that could be genuine but could also be malicious. “Good to see you.”

“Can’t you just leave well enough alone?”

Something in her expression glints dangerously with mental acuity. It’s a physical shift in her demeanor. “What’s to stop a law-abiding citizen from stopping by to see a friend?”

“Law abiding citizen,” he laughs, partly genuine and partly malicious. “How many times have you been sued for libel, Ms. _Lounds_?”

She presses her lips together. “That’s beside the point, Mr. _Zeller_.”

“Look, I don’t care what you think you’re doing here, but you’re not helping anyone. No one needs to know about Will Graham’s latest trip to the hospital.”

“Will Graham,” she repeats, eyes shining with interest.

_Oh, fuck me._

“I was unaware that he was here,” she tells him, so innocently.

He swallows. “What.”

The nurse from before finds them and taps Freddie’s shoulder. She tells her, “We moved Mr. Roscoe to the fourth floor, Ms. Lounds.”

 _Mr. Roscoe as in Wendell Roscoe,_ he thinks miserably as Freddie’s giving him a wink over her shoulder and making her exit. _Brian Zeller, you Goddamn moron._

He counts it as a loss and trudges off for Will’s room. They’ve been sitting with him in shifts: Katz gets the first slot in the morning, followed by Dr. Bloom at noon, Bowman in the late afternoon, Price in the evening, Zeller for the first part of nightfall, and Jack for the graveyard shift. The main thing they’d agreed upon was that Will should not be left unsupervised at any time, period. Apart from them, the only person cleared to see Will is Dr. Lecter, and he hasn’t chosen to drop by just yet.

Zeller doesn’t blame Lecter for waiting elsewhere. It’s been nearly two months of waiting. As long as he doesn’t back out of their over-arching arrangement, Zeller can’t see them having a problem. He meets Price at the door to Will’s room and asks with his eyebrows what it looks like tonight. Price shrugs and shakes his head.

“Damn it,” Zeller breathes, dejected. “How did this even happen?”

“The way anything happens.” Price rubs at his forehead. “Action and reaction.”

“I don’t understand how we could have missed it.”

“That’s what everyone says.”

“Oh,” Zeller blurts out, grabbing Price’s shoulder before he can trudge off. “I may have, um, bumped into Freddie Lounds on my way in.”

“God,” Price sighs.

“It wasn’t exactly like that.” He takes his hand back and scratches at his beard. “She was just here to see a friend, didn’t know that Will was here.”

“What a relief.”

Zeller stares at him. He winces when the realization dawns on Price’s face. “You didn’t.”

“I…may have.”

“Brian.”

“What! You did it, too! If she’d seen me or any of us lurking around the building she would have caught on and snooped around, like she does.”

“Okay, look, just.” Price covers his face with his hands, clearly stressed and probably hungry. Zeller thinks to ask if he wants to grab dinner except duty calls. “Just sit with him for your turn and don’t let anyone in apart from hospital staff. Don’t leave the room, for anything.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know the drill.”

“Jesus, Brian,” Price mutters as he’s walking away rubbing slowly at a crick in his neck.

Zeller scowls to himself and heads into Will’s room with a dog-eared paperback copy of William Blake’s _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. He asked his father it to send him almost two months ago when Will first got sick. His second week in the hospital Brian got the brilliant idea to read aloud, but he hadn’t broken out Blake until tonight for some self-conscious fear of Will waking up and catching him red-handed with such obviously themed subject matter. If Will did wake up while he was reading, he probably wouldn’t even ask Zeller why he’d selected it. Curiosity drives much of what Will does and how he processes new information, but he’d curbed it a lot since leaving Louisiana.

The main thing he doesn’t want is for Will to observe the title and frown at the irony, thinking Zeller’s trying to be funny about an always-sensitive topic. He isn’t trying to be funny. All he’s doing is picking up on some of Will’s trademark inquisitiveness—trying to learn more about divinity and opulence as far as humans just like him aspired to understand it. Maybe it’s a forgivable deed. If it doesn’t seem to be at first, Zeller would explain.

That’s all supposing Will wakes up while he’s here. Zeller gave himself this same pep talk when he read _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ just last week.

He sits quietly for a while, contemplating possible conversations, thumbing at the worn corners of his father’s book, and listening to the beep of machines and the two-toned clicks of the second hand on the clock by the door. Zeller watches Will for a few minutes, wary and unnerved, worried, before he opens the book and reads. Since it arrived in the mail he’d read through it twice in its entirety, but he starts where it’s fair for Will to start: at the beginning.

“ _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ : the Argument,” he announces, voice keyed up just a bit louder but not enough to be heard from beyond the door. “Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air, / Hungry clouds swag on the deep.”

The first time he encountered the line about clouds swagging, he’d snickered. He’s a man-sized boy, what can he do? But Will doesn’t laugh, doesn’t move, or do anything. It’s not like before at Interim LSU when he pretended for the majority of the staff and for anyone who came to see him otherwise. He doesn’t just blink his eyes open and plunge everyone around him into a well of recovered memory and emotion just like he didn’t wake for _Heart of Darkness_ or for _The Tempest_ , which Zeller read in one sitting when Jack got delayed and then had to cancel his shift altogether.

“Then the perilous path was planted,” Zeller reads, tweaking his accent as he goes for his own entertainment. He processes what he reads better if there’s something in it for him to laugh at. Continuing on in what he thinks resembles a Southern preacher’s voice, he carries on, waving one hand vaguely for an increased blasphemous effect, “And a river and a spring / On every cliff and tomb; / And on the bleached bones / Red clay brought forth: / Till the villain left the paths of ease / To walk in perilous paths, and drive / The just man into barren climes. / Now the sneaking serpent walks / In mild humility; / And the just man rages in the wilds / Where lions roam.”

Zeller clears his throat, drops his gesticulating hand into his lap, and reads the last line to himself again.

“That’s a bit weird, isn’t it? See, the first time I read it, I thought the lions were supposed to be reminiscent of Daniel in the pit, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. Yeah,” Zeller cedes to the unspoken counterargument that Will can’t give him, “Blake probably _was_ trying to evoke biblical imagery, but I think it’s just Nature—just the blank canvas of jungle we call savagery because we can’t control it. So the idea of lions in the street and roaming is supposed to frighten us because we can’t even fathom coming out on top in _the wilds_. The serpent, obviously, that’s just a man, right? Otherwise he’d crawl, and we’d be able to recognize him at a glance.”

Zeller hums at the answering silence and traces circles around the shakily underlined passages his father made note of. “I don’t actually know who Rintrah is. I guess that would have been a good thing to look up before I came here tonight.”

He wishes he didn’t feel quite so hopeless about the whole thing, so completely thrown for a loop. They’d long since patched things up following their spat in New Orleans—Zeller’s trust issues and consequent outburst at Will for withholding evidence. It isn’t in Zeller’s breeding to change his mind about something just to be agreeable, but Will _had_ changed Zeller’s mind and made him see that some information needed filtering, to an extent. He’d resigned himself to thinking of it as a buffer instead of blatant censorship. Zeller wouldn’t ask Will for state secrets if he were a federal agent, so he isn’t going to make a habit of asking for supernatural secrets either unless Will offers them up freely.

 _Still_ , he thinks, with a teeny tiny grudge gnawing at him, _He could have told us what we were dealing with, without divulging all the nitty gritty stuff._

Zeller continues to read, leaving his mutinous thoughts behind and soaking up the Proverbs as he reverts back to his ordinary voice: “The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow. / The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.”

Something shivers in the room and the hairs on his arms stand up. A moment later he’s on his feet, too, whipping around three-hundred and sixty degrees to check the room. The book comes up in front of him like an impromptu weapon as he backs into Will’s corner right at his bedside. His heart skips a beat on the monitor, and the tension in the air thickens. There’s static in his ears followed by ringing that picks up and picks up. Nobody comes running inside, and from what he can see on the monitor, Will’s levels are all normal. He chances a quick look out the door, and everything is just hunky dory.

In a split second, as abruptly as an outright frame change, the rush stops. Will’s heart monitor beeps evenly, obscenely loud in the breathlessly quiet room. Zeller blinks and actively forces himself to suck in a breath. Once it’s there he takes a few more, measured and careful, but clumsy.

“ _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ ,” a voice behind him observes, making his lungs pinch tight around the air he keeps forgetting to let go. “I liked Conrad well enough, you know.”

Zeller spins to face his friend. “Oh, my God.”

“Well.” Will winces, not liking the saying.

“I mean, you—you’re…how do you feel?” Zeller runs over with two left feet and his heart pounding in his chest. “There was something weird a few seconds ago right before you woke up. Do you…?”

“Do I know what it was?” Will frowns, eyes dropping to the book on the floor where it jumped out of Zeller’s hands. “I don’t think I felt anything right before I woke up.”

“But…”

For a guy who feels and knows a lot, there’s way too much lately that Will’s been getting wrong. Concern starts to ebb into his expression, a lazy manifestation but present all the same. “What is it?”

“It’s just, I don’t know.” He shakes his head and starts to dismiss the complaint that was building on his tongue. Will gives him a look, agitated and eager. Zeller sighs, not knowing what else to do but fess up. “The air was all weird, and then your heart skipped a beat. Something happened.”

Will says, “It didn’t hurt if it did.” A very childlike yawn overtakes him, and he looks, for a moment, like one of Blake’s lions with his black mane fanned away from his face after many nights of lying perfectly still. “How long have I…” His voice trails off, something frantic occurring to him and spurning his question on all the more urgently: “Brian, how many days?”

“I…you’ve been out for nearly two months.”

“No, no, no.” Will starts to get out of bed before Zeller can stop him. He sways into the wall, balance all gone to shit even after Zeller gets a hold of him. “I have to get out of here,” he explains, nearly in hysterics. “I have to get _out of here_.”

“Will, calm down. You’re all right.” Zeller struggles to keep Will from moving too far from the bed and ripping his IVs out. They’ haven’t had the best luck with hospitals, so the anxiety doesn’t strike him as odd in the slightest. “We’ve been watching you every minute that you’ve been laid up in here, okay? No one’s been in or out that we didn’t see for ourselves.”

“Who?” he asks hesitantly, sounding like he dreads the answer. “You, Jack, Beverly, Lloyd…”

“And Price and Dr. Bloom,” Zeller confirms. Will waits a beat with round eyes, the blue in them looking very pallid in the clinical light. He sinks down onto the bed, looking for all the world like he’s just lost all hope. Zeller frowns and crouches to the side of Will’s knee within arms’ reach—and more immediately, within kicking distance. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Dr. Lecter, did…” Will drops his eyes, jaw clenching. “Did he leave, like the others?”

“He’s still in the game, Will,” he answers, watching his voice and trying to make everything about his tone and his aura soothing and comfortable. His younger brother went through a phase in high school right as Zeller was getting ready to apply for grad school where he was really into guided mediation and deep breathing. Maybe it’s heavy-handed to resort to that obvious of a technique, but Will looks lost and miserable. Zeller just wants to ease his doubts. “From what I hear he’s been asking Jack for updates every other day. I think he’s peeved about how often you end up in the hospital on our watch.”

A shaky smile flickers over Will’s mouth. “I know the feeling.”

Zeller gives him a moment to let it soak in that he hasn’t been abandoned yet again before pressing the Call button. The same nurse that spoke to Freddie Lounds walks in, clocks Will’s conscious state, and scribbles ceaselessly on the clipboard hanging at the end of his bed. She asks Will a dozen questions, and Zeller waits with his arms crossed over his chest. Jack will be coming in for his shift in the next hour and a half.

They arrange to move Will into a room on the fourth floor, at which Zeller immediately bristles because he knows that’s where Freddie Lounds is currently stationed. He calls Jack and hovers in the doorway while the nurses coordinate the IV and heart monitor around Will’s bed. 

“Will’s awake,” he says instead of _Howdy do._

“Same room?”

He hears rustling on Jack’s side of the connection. “No, fourth floor now. Freddie Lounds is here, just so you know.”

Jack sighs. A door closes, and then there are footsteps echoing. “Text me the room number.”

Zeller sends a mass text to the whole mob of people involved in Will’s recovery with the room number attached at the end as an afterthought. By the time he’s done, the nurses are filtering out into the hallway. He stands aside to let them through and then steps back inside, closing the door behind him, wary of Freddie Lounds walking by and just happening to recognize Will from the photographs of him online.

Will looks like he’s going to vibrate off the bed and out the window that probably doesn’t open when he says, “I want to talk to Dr. Lecter.”

“You’ll get to talk to him,” Zeller reassures him with a single nod of his head. “Jack’s on his way. We’ll see about getting him down here in the morning.”

The exasperation on Will’s face is so unfairly comforting that Zeller has to smile at him. “He’s not going anywhere, I promise.”

“That’s not an oath you have any authority to make,” Will says, all serious, broody eyes and a downturned mouth.

“Maybe not,” Zeller grants him. “But I have a feeling about this guy.”

“What feeling.”

_Jeez, Will, sound a little more doubtful of my judge of character, why don’t you?_

“I was in the room when you guys met, remember? I heard you go back and forth with him like you always want to go back and forth with us. Look, even if Lecter does back out—which I’m not downplaying because if he backs out now, there will be hell to pay—I don’t think you’d be rid of him that easily.”

“Swarna Misra was healthily interested in what I had to say.”

“You said Swarna Misra had bad dreams,” Zeller counters, pointing out the apparent flaw in the comparison.

Will corrects him, “Visions. She and Jeffrey Pearce both; they had visions.”

“Lecter won’t have visions.” The note of certainty in his declarative tone catches Will’s attention, causes a little knit to settle in between his dark eyebrows. “Nope, he won’t. He can’t. It’d be breaking the rules.”

“What do you mean?” Will asks, slowly, like he thinks Zeller’s gone off his rocker.

“The third time’s the charm, right?” Zeller shrugs. “Even you can’t be that unlucky.”

“This is my third time in the hospital.”

More because he needs to say something than because he believes it, he says, “So something remarkable will happen.”

Will looks down at his hands, the old scarring from the lightning strikes that hurled him down to the earth all but vanished. Here and there moon-colored chinks of healed-over scar tissue show through like jagged divisions in the composite of his flesh. Zeller can see one on the slope of his wrist, balmier than the rest of his skin and faintly shiny like a smudged dime. It’s sort of poetic. He wonders briefly what Will’s wings looked like in their prime, before his fall burned them into little more than mucous, webbed appendages, seared and mutilated beyond repair. Nervous at the inherent risk of Will catching onto his line of thought, he looks around, clenches and unclenches his hands.

“Did I leave my book behind?”

“You never picked it up after you dropped it on the floor,” Will reminds him casually, looking quite unbothered with everything. Only a few moments ago he’d been distraught at the threat of abandonment. Now he just looks bored. 

“Wait, you said you liked Conrad?”

Will nods. “Yes.”

“So you heard everything I said to you?”

“I heard what all of you said. It was murky, but even in fever dreams it isn’t impossible to catch meaning from the symbols presented.”

“Huh.”

“Are you going to retrieve your book?”

“I’ll wait for Jack to get here.” Zeller checks his phone. “Beverly said she’s on her way, Dr. Bloom said she’ll be by in the morning, and Price is probably asleep.”

“What about Lloyd?”

“He hasn’t replied yet.” Zeller tucks his phone into his pocket. “Knowing him, he probably got the message and dove into his car without thinking to write back. He’s sort of unpredictable that way.”

“Another word for unpredictable is unreliable,” Will thinks aloud, voice taking on the barest hints of a warning tone, like he detects an insult somewhere in Zeller’s statement that he doesn’t like.

“I’ve only ever known him to be the exact opposite,” Zeller says calmly to placate Will, who looks satisfied enough.

Jack comes in after another ten minutes of idle conversational warfare for which Zeller can’t help but feel totally inadequate as a participant. Will brightens when Jack confirms what Zeller said about Lecter’s inquiries, how consistent they’d been in concern and frequency.

“I talked to him on the phone in the parking lot. He said he can see you tomorrow, just as a show of good faith.”

“He predicted Will’s insecurity all the way from Baltimore. That’s impressive.”

Will shoots Zeller an annoyed look for his teasing. He turns his eyes back on Jack and asks, “When?”

“Probably later in the evening—he looked, and he’s got a full schedule.”

The door opens, briefly distracting them. Katz pokes her head in and rushes inside when she locks onto the person of her primary concern. “Will!”

He makes a sound like, “Uhhhmf?” when she throws her arms around him in a very bold, very affectionate embrace.

His hands come up automatically to reciprocate, which surprises Zeller. For some reason, he’d thought Will would fidget and not know what to do with himself, but it comes to him naturally. It’s a practiced action from a too-short life he lived long ago. Zeller should have known better than to think him inexperienced. He _does_ know better than to think _that_.

“Don’t do that again,” she says, letting go of him.

“I won’t,” he replies stoically. 

“Good.”

“I’ll be right back,” Zeller tells Jack as Katz is sitting on the side of Will’s bed and getting comfortable. Jack nods for him to go, and Zeller’s off.

His book is gone from Will’s old room on the third floor when he gets there, so he resorts to the Lost and Found but doesn’t find it there either. He racks his brain for a while, befuddled, and then an idea occurs to him. It should have been more obvious, probably, but he’s had other things on his mind distracting him. Zeller pinches the bridge of his nose and flashes his badge to a nurse on three. She gives him Wendell Roscoe’s room number.

Back on four, he literally runs into Bowman getting off the elevator. His dark skin is pale, less like its usual chestnut hue and more like dun. Zeller steadies him and asks if he’s all right. Bowman just nods jerkily, sounding together enough for Zeller not to push the issue but not quite enough to sound unbothered. Zeller knows he feels guilty about Will’s encephalitis going unnoticed. It was advanced to a pretty scary place when they admitted him, but it could have been so much worse than it was. He tells him that.

“We all saw bits and pieces of it, and none of us could fit them together. Even the doctors missed it, Lloyd. It’s not your fault.”

Bowman chews on his lip and looks for a minute like he wants to sob—the dry-heaving kind that strangles a person’s lungs on the way out. He pats Bowman on the shoulder twice and squeezes on the second. “If you go in there blaming yourself, you’re just going to upset him. You know what he said when I told him I didn’t know if you were coming tonight?”

He grimaces like he doesn’t want to hear it but asks anyway. “What?”

“He said that just because you’re unpredictable it doesn’t mean you’re unreliable.” A harsh sound like a sigh shoots out of Bowman’s mouth and his eyes shine. He looks away, but Zeller has more to tell him: “When he thought that _I_ was suggesting that you could be unreliable, he got this look on his face like he wanted to sic a pack of hounds on me.”

Bowman laughs, wetly.

“Now come on. Beverly beat you to the punch already. He might be good for _one_ more hug, but not if you sit here feeling sorry for yourself and a situation you couldn’t have predicted any more than anyone else did.”

“Yeah, okay,” Bowman replies quietly but with a small smile on his face. It tightens for a moment and he grabs Zeller’s arm firmly. “Thanks, Brian.”

He smiles and playfully bats his hand away as he says, “Eh, get out of my face.”

Bowman’s laugh is stronger this time, more like himself than a scared boy rendered that way by helpless concern. Zeller slinks by the door left ajar after Bowman’s slipped inside and smirks, pleased, at the wide smile Will gives him.

 _Now then,_ he thinks gloomily, turning to break left down the hall. _About that book._

Wendell Roscoe is on some kind of fantastic painkiller when Zeller strolls into his room without any difficulty at all. He’s a moderately attractive guy, only just on the other side of plain. A lot of him is covered up and propped up pretty horribly like he got banged up by something huge and heavy.

His skin beneath the extensive gauze bandages is an interesting olive color that suggests a mixed race of some sort. It complements Freddie Lounds’ astonishingly well, better than his own fairer complexion ever did, which is a different story for another time like, oh, any other time when he isn’t staring at Wendell Roscoe’s blissfully unconscious form. Zeller’s never actually understood the arrangement, whether Roscoe’s a friend or a romantic partner or some other indefinable thing that isn’t any of his business. 

“ _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ ,” Freddie Lounds says, finally looking up at him from her chair pulled up near Roscoe’s pillow. Her feet are up on the side of the bed; she’s taken her shoes off so as to be less impolite, he supposes. “An interesting selection.”

“It’s my dad’s,” he explains, though he’s under no obligation to do any such thing. “Old time religious nut; he’s really into the Romantic period.”

“I always preferred Blake’s etchings to his poetry, personally.”

“Typically they went hand-in-hand,” Zeller murmurs, pulling the door closed behind him and stepping further into the room. The air is fragrant with the smell of perfume. He thinks it might be honeydew or something equally subtle and soft. “Let me guess: The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun.”

“The Tyger, actually,” she says, smiling that ghost of a smile she turned on him before that’s half-amused at him and half-pleased with herself for some ominous, unnamed reason. It makes him feel like a mouse looking up at a grinning feline. “Fearful symmetry has always been a point of interest for me.”

“The Tyger’s what you get when you send the Lamb to war.”

“I think you mean the slaughter.”

“No, I mean war.” He holds his hand out for the book, and she gives it to him. “Slaughter is all about perspective.”

“Your father’s handwriting is lovely. Is he still alive?”

“Yes.”

“I’d love to get his story.”

“You’d love to get everyone’s story.”

“Just those of interesting people.”

He doesn’t roll his eyes. Instead he angles his head to Wendell Roscoe. “What’s his story?”

“Car accident,” she says lightly. She turns those sharp, thoughtful eyes on Roscoe, looking far more tired in profile than she does head-on. “He can be a perfect idiot when he wants to be.”

Zeller nods, not wanting to ask anything else about him. The fact of his accident, even out of context, feels like more than enough. “Why are you so interested in Will Graham?”

She watches him, undaunted by his question. “Interesting things happen to him.”

“I get why you’d want to cover him—get to him before somebody bigger and more respectable snatches him up. I understand that you think there’s some big worthwhile lesson you can spin out of all the bad things he’s experienced, but after a certain point…” He shakes his head. “Maybe I’m calling out to deaf ears here, but couldn’t you at least draw the line at harassment?”

“Are you suggesting _I_ harassed Will Graham? I’ve never even spoken to him.”

“You ruined the anonymity we were trying to give him,” Zeller states, counting on his fingers. “You violated privacy laws to access his medical records. You’re building him up into some kind of meme-status figure when he’s just a person dodging bullets everywhere he goes.”

“I’m not the one who put him in harm’s way.” She stands. “He stepped in front of a bullet working _for you_ , not reacting to what I wrote about him on my blog.”

“So what’s your endgame, Freddie? You want him to be unemployed because our work is dangerous?”

Roscoe groans softly through the haze of drugs, injury, and sleep. Freddie and Zeller turn and watch him for a moment, but he doesn’t protest again. She turns on him, mouth in a straight, solid line. “You know what my endgame is? It’s Jack Crawford.”

“What?” He pings his eyes between hers, searching. The word tumbles out of him. “What?”

“Will Graham isn’t the first under-qualified “trainee” he’s sent into the field before it was advisable for him to do so.”

Zeller closes his eyes and squeezes the spine of the book in his hand compulsively. For a few seconds he can’t breathe or think of a retort. What he says doesn’t even constitute the makings of a reply, but it’s all he can say. “What happened to Miriam…”

“Can’t happen ever again,” she finishes for him, fire in her brilliant, blue eyes once he opens his to look.

_Tyger Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night._

“It shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

“No.” He swallows, clearing his throat around the roughness finding its way into his voice. “No, it shouldn’t have.”

“And yet.” Her features become sharper and her posture more rigid. “You find Will Graham wandering the streets of New Orleans with no I.D., no credentials, no record of him existing anywhere. You take him to work with you, and before the week is up, he gets shot protecting a potential accomplice in a murder investigation, _your_ witness. Now he’s in the hospital again, God knows for what.”

“Freddie,” he stops her, unable to tolerate it for much longer. “I want to protect him, too. We all do.”

He stays perfectly still under her careful scrutiny and flinches when she says, void of any kind of emotion at all, “Well, you aren’t doing a very good job of it.”

Roscoe’s doctor comes in just then, so Zeller flees while it’s still a tactically sound move to make. There’s a tiny kitchenette-type of side room without a door where he seeks refuge. After making the least disgusting cup of reasonably hot coffee that he can, he shoots down to the ground floor and wanders outside into a deserted courtyard to clear his head.

It’s a low blow for any of them, mentioning Lass like she was little more than a parable or a scary cautionary tale for all the new recruits who never knew her. Zeller cuts Freddie a bit more slack than to think she brought her up just to provoke him, but it doesn’t mean others hadn’t reduced Miriam to a generic strike against Jack’s record. People inside the Bureau had done it, questioned Jack’s methods and investigated him when she disappeared…

He scrubs his sleeve over his face for the tears trying to come, angry and mournful but mostly the former. There’s still a chill clinging to the air, but Will missed most of the winter. For some reason Zeller thinks he’ll be more upset about having lost the season than the time itself. At least it means Bowman won’t freeze Will’s ass off taking him ice fishing. Really, though, considering how they found Will at the bottom of an icy hole in the ground right at the start of winter, he can’t imagine Will fussing much about some cold weather. It’s part of why the joke about him wandering off into snow drifts got on his nerves—because if he was cold, he would just let himself be cold and never once complain about it.

There’s a woman sitting on the bench farthest from the hospital exit in a gown and slippers when he takes a proper look around after draining his coffee. She’s older, and her hair is trimmed short. Her knees are drawn up, and she’s shivering when Zeller gets to her. He asks if she wants to go inside, and she tells him to leave her alone.

It’s well-lit in the courtyard, but badge or no badge he doesn’t want to be seen dragging a female patient around in an unsupervised area. Truth be told, he’s less concerned about what other people would think than he is about what she would think. Following his failed attempt to politely ask her to go inside, he makes a detour to the front desk and informs the woman there of the situation. She sends nurses back outside with him, and the woman is still there on the bench. The nurses with him know her and call her by name.

Her name is Miriam Huong.

She looks right at Zeller as the nurses are walking her back inside. While they’re talking to each other behind her back, she whispers for only him to hear, “It goes deeper than their blood.”

The pair of nurses struggles to get her onto a gurney when she starts thrashing against them. She breaks one of their noses with the back of her head before Zeller manages to restrain her, aided by the as-yet uninjured nurse. The bleeding nurse stays behind with him and says he’s never known Miriam to be violent. She’s a recovering cancer patient, usually more sluggish than active. Zeller’s helping the nurse, Isaiah, to the restrooms, when Freddie Lounds steps out of the elevator and sees him, eyes wide and curious.

He sighs and urges Isaiah through the door, stepping in front of it with his body so she can’t pass through. “You’ve got blood on you,” she says instead of _What the hell happened?_

“Not that I have to tell you anything, but there was an incident with a disorderly patient.”

“Male or female?”

He huffs. “Oh, just leave it out, would you?”

“Fine. I can ask around anyway. Someone saw something. One of them will talk.”

“Have at it,” he says blandly. They stand and stare at each other until Isaiah comes out of the restroom with his face more or less in order. “You all right, man?”

“Yeah, Brian, thanks.”

Freddie watches him, probably memorizing his face. She lets him go without saying anything to keep him, but Zeller doesn’t count it as a win. He doesn’t count it as anything. “How’s Wendell?” he asks.

“He’s the same. They got him last night, so I wasn’t expecting him to just make a full recovery on the spot.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For Wendell’s car accident? _That_ wasn’t your fault.” She gives him an expectant look. He doesn’t know what to say, so he just quirks an eyebrow. She continues, _so_ helpfully, “I _would_ appreciate the chance to talk to Will Graham, but you wouldn’t allow that, would you?”

“He’s an adult,” Zeller hedges. “If you want to see him, you need clearance. I can’t get you that.”

“There’s no one guarding his door now,” she corrects him, stepping in closer.

“What?”

“I tried to go in, but there was some guy inside with an accent. Mr. Graham got very upset until I agreed to leave.”

“What guy with an accent? Was it his doctor?”

“Do you mean Dr. Lecter?” The look on her face is attentive, careful. “He said his name was Lecter.”

“I need to go.”

Thoroughly exhausted and rattled, he heads for Will’s room with his book safely in hand. The door is closed when he gets there, so he stops mid-stride and stares at the handle, discomfited. He has a creeping feeling just under his skin.

When reaches for the door it swings open unceremoniously and nearly takes him out. It does hit him, but he jerks away from the most of it. Just like Freddie said, it’s Dr. Lecter on the other side of the door, the handle crushed in his hand. Zeller’s arm stings a bit from the force of the door when it smacked into him. Lecter’s stronger than he looks.

The doctor finds his eyes, looking winded and speechless, though an apology tumbles past his lips, rehearsed enough to come on autopilot regardless of internal conflict. “Forgive me. I didn’t realize you were trying to come in.”

“No, Doctor, I shouldn’t have been…dallying,” he says pathetically. “I thought—Jack said you were going to come tomorrow night?”

“I felt too restless to sleep.” Some of Lecter’s grace sifts back into him. “I know hospitals are not known for their lenient visiting hours, but I anticipated there would be enough FBI agents here for me to bypass those rules.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, understanding. “Will was really agitated wanting to see you. It’s good that you could come early.”

Lecter nods, all formal propriety and almost grandiose mannerisms. “Excuse me.”

“Oh, right,” he mumbles, sidestepping out of the doorway so Lecter can cross the threshold. “Sorry.” His eyes skate down to Lecter’s lapels as he’s twisting to pull the door shut behind him. The front of his jacket is strangely wrinkled and sporadically drenched. “Wait, did…is that?” He swallows.

“He was a bit overwhelmed. These circumstances would trouble anyone.”

“Yeah,” Zeller allows, losing his breath and trying for the handle when Lecter stops him, fingers closed neatly around his forearm right above the wrist.

“For an individual under constant surveillance, some time alone could be relaxing, therapeutic.”

“Someone’s got to stay with him. Jack’s orders,” Zeller argues, still too breathless for his liking.

“Wait outside if you need to, but please, give him this respite.”

“Sure, okay.”

Lecter releases him, and Zeller takes three quick steps back while Lecter stays right in the doorway. “Unless you would prefer that I stay here in your place?”

“I think Will would feel better if he could get to you right away.”

“Very well.”

“But I’m going to be over here,” Zeller warns—why he’s warning Lecter of all people, he doesn’t really know.

“People are certainly more liable to listen to you than they are to me.” Lecter bows his head humbly, probably referring to Zeller’s badge. He doesn’t believe a word of it. Dr. Lecter could command a large, noisy room of people just by laughing too loudly and pretending to be embarrassed as he apologized. There’s something charismatic and captivating about the good doctor. Zeller bets his patients don’t have any trouble at all opening up to him. “Brian Zeller, wasn’t it?”

“Oh,” he mumbles, reaching to shake Lecter’s hand. “Yes, sorry.”

“ _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ ,” Lecter parrots the title of the book in his other hand, marking the third time tonight.

_So something remarkable will happen._

“I was reading to him when he woke up.”

Lecter hums. “I’m sure he appreciates the gesture.”

“He remembered me doing it.”

“Not uncommon of comatose patients.”

“Why didn’t you come and visit him?” Lecter looks at him, and Zeller refuses the urge to avert his eyes. “He was convinced you gave him up. If he had heard your voice just once while he was out, he wouldn’t have been so afraid that you’d left.”

“I haven’t left him. I have no plans to leave him,” Dr. Lecter asserts in a longsuffering voice suffused with enduring patience. “Whatever fear he has where my commitment to him is concerned,” he murmurs, reaching up to button the abused halves of his suit jacket, “they are unfounded.”

Zeller studies the wet patches staining Lecter’s front where Will’s tears smeared into the material. He stares for a long time before looking away. Were they tears of relief? Was he stressed? Had Lecter _done_ something to elicit the reaction? _Could_ he have done anything to cause Will to react in such a way? Zeller can’t remember if he’s ever seen Will cry. He knows he hasn’t seen him produce the likes of what he did to Lecter’s suit.

“We’ll pay for the dry cleaning,” he says, fumbling with the edges of the book uselessly.

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Are you sure, um, that he doesn’t want somebody right now? If he’s in a bad place, I could get Bowman to come and see him. He has a nephew kind of like Will in a lot of ways. They get along really well.”

“Lloyd Bowman, Will’s guardian?”

“Ah, yeah. Don’t tell _him_ that. He hates it—not living with Will. That part’s really great for both of them, except for the whole encephalitis thing.”

Lecter tilts his head to one side, silently figuring. “They live in a wooded area.”

“Bowman’s got a farm, owns lots of land around it.”

“Does he keep livestock?”

“Oh, no, he doesn’t really use it for that. He just likes the open space, the isolation. There is a dog, though. Will has a thing about strays they find on the road near his house, but it’s just them and Winston for right now.”

“That sounds peaceful.”

“Yeah, they do all right.” He nods. “Will’s happy there at least.”

A thoughtful look glazes over Lecter’s eyes, and he is instantly very far away from the present moment. Zeller just waits for him to drift back. Will sometimes does that, after all, zones out when he imagines something too clearly and loses himself to the scenes that unfold for him. Maybe this is the glue that binds them, makes the two such a good, solid match for each other. Lecter’s technically off the books anyway where Will Graham is concerned, but Zeller just wonders as he’s standing here shooting the shit whether patient and doctor could ever be friends.

He tries to discern whether the tragedy is that Lecter can’t be both to Will or if it’s that he could never surrender his office and keep Will for a friend in the aftermath. Dr. Bloom had already beaten Lecter to the punch in that respect. If Zeller were in his shoes, maybe he’d harbor negative feelings about it. But Lecter isn’t Zeller, and Zeller isn’t in a position of having to choose between his professional obligation and his personal one.

 _Not yet,_ he thinks. Push always comes to shove, and there’s no stopping it.

“His happiness is what matters,” Lecter says eventually. Zeller doesn’t know how much time has passed, but when he opens his eyes, his father’s book is in Lecter’s hands. “We are, all of us, deeply invested in his happiness.”

Zeller sighs and leans against the wall. He doesn’t need to voice his agreement. They’re on the same page. “Maybe he’s through the worst of it,” he tries, experimenting with hope. He’s rewarded for his effort with a smile, small but warm enough.

“If he’s not, we are here to help him,” Lecter says with a small nod.

He ignores the way the darkness in Lecter’s eyes draws a shiver through him—or more that it sparks a relaxed current right down his spine that _makes_ him shiver. For all of two seconds before Lecter ditches his eyes to peruse through _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ , Zeller tries to guess at what sorts of things Will Graham experiences when he’s speaking with Lecter one-on-one. He tries to imagine what Lecter experiences, if Will’s ever grafted his empathy onto Lecter like an immersive but never interactive projection.

Sliding his gaze away, he promptly decides that it’s none of his business. Nurses bustle around them, and the night drags on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ by William Blake
> 
> “Lions in the street and roaming” from The Doors
> 
> “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye,/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” from Blake’s “The Tyger” ( _Songs of Experience_ ); “The Lamb” is from _Songs of Innocence_


	9. (I Heard that) Lonesome Whistle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Abel receives a visitor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _All he does is sit and cry / When the evening train goes by / He heard that long lonesome whistle blow / He’ll be locked there in this cell / ‘Til his body’s just a shell / And his hair turns whiter than snow_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> “The violence of beast on beast is read  
> As natural law, but upright man  
> Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.”  
> -Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa”

“Well, well,” Abel drawls, though a pleased smirk teases at the edges of his mouth. _Will Graham_ looks paler than the last time they met in this room, but that was over a month ago. On some timelines that’s nothing. On a timeline like the one measuring Abel’s current situation, it’s an irritation. “He walks among us still. Thought you’d forgotten about me, these weeks you’ve been away.”

“I was in the hospital,” Will says measuredly, sitting down at the table. He studies Abel’s hands, cuffed and laced together at the fingers in plain sight. “Brain infection.”

“That sounds quite extreme,” Abel murmurs, immediately suspicious. “You didn’t look sick to me the last time I saw you.” Will’s eyes jump up to his, and the drain of color in his complexion looks less an effect of fatigued health than it does a wounded spirit. Carefully, he asks, “Were you sick the last time I saw you?”

“Yes,” Will sighs, dropping his gaze to the table and resting his elbows there before holding his face in his hands. “Encephalitis.”

“Difficult for that type of infection to go unnoticed in its more theatrical stages.”

“I had a seizure.”

“Theatrical,” Abel repeats, tipping his head. “Are you recovered?”

“More or less.”

“Well, you seem radically transformed,” Abel tells him flatly, meaning every word and asking for truth that his visitor looks unwilling to provide. “Something’s bothering you.”

Quietly as if with shame, Will confides, “Yes.”

“What is it, Ninka?”

Upon hearing the name, Will looks at him, surprised. He’s always steadily pleased to hear the old words, whether in wild, buzzing debate, in slow, calculated sentences, or in singular words, such as _ninka_. Abel’s made a habit of dropping nicknames when he talks with _Will_. As often as he refers to him as Will in his mind, he hates to do it in speech. Ninka is just an old word that means mongoose.

For a moment he expects he’ll have to explain the choice he’s made just now with _ninka_ , but Will just stares at him. The look on his face is fascinated and further down, deeply hurt by something that Abel doesn’t believe he will share with him this night or any night. When Will doesn’t ask, Abel resorts to the simplest explanation: “I cringe a little bit calling you Will, Mr. Graham. I’ve got to say, it works well for you as a pseudonym, but I’ve always hated the loss of my old name. I imagine you must as well. It’s a terrible thing to have your identity taken from you.”

Will nods after a long, thoughtful pause that feels traitorous even to Abel. He concedes, voice a mere whisper as if it will nullify the honesty behind the admission, “I do, I hate it.”

“Your human entourage, they don’t call you by name?”

“They call me Will,” he answers thickly, the exterior of him looking quite numb.

Abel watches him and tests the authentic name in the soundless palace of his mind before speaking it on a breath just to witness the reaction it earns him. _Will Graham_ deflates, the tension goes out of his shoulders, and the shutters coming down over his eyes lift to expose the raw sorrow festering there behind the aloof façade that’s begun to look unfamiliarly natural on his face. 

“Katya got used to calling me Abel,” he says once Will has relaxed more completely into himself and started to ping his eyes around the room in a curious, hungry fashion like he thinks he can still glean new information from it. Will frowns at the despondent chord in Abel’s voice, and he thinks of the stupid irony that he refers to both of them in terms of official address—Abel Gideon, former surgeon, and Will Graham, Special Agent with the FBI. “She thought I came to like it.”

“Did you ever tell her?”

“One night I did.” Abel nods, and Will watches him. “It’s not what you think. We were children at the time.”

“So she knew early on, that this life…”

Will doesn’t continue. Abel doesn’t doubt that he can’t, not in words.

“I imagine she knew before she ever laid eyes on me,” Abel muses slowly, something near to loss and nearer to regret churning behind his throat. “Some of them are like that.”

“Jack is,” Will answers readily like he’s been thinking about it for a long time. “He’s ĝissu.”

Intrigued, Abel tilts his head to one side and asks, “An aegis, really?”

“Katya wasn’t yours?”

“Her brother was.”

“That must have been frustrating for her, to compete with him.”

“She was a patient woman, Katya, but that was the way everything came to her.”

There’s a shift in the air, and Abel can name the shadow falling over them. It precedes a question he’s been asked before to which he’s never allowed himself to attach any emotion or remorse. Even so, a prickle of deep sadness flowers in the hollow of his chest, just behind his sternum. 

Softly, Will asks him, “Why did you kill them?”

Abel clears his throat. “You never answered _my_ question.”

Will doesn’t ask him to repeat it. He says, “There was someone from my past.”

Knowingly, Abel replies with the name he’s heard whispered since the unquiet years predating his own fall: “Ose.”

The glint in Will’s eyes is upsetting, too enraptured and invested in the legend Abel always wished to be a lie. “Ose,” he confirms, eyes blazing as some of the life comes back into his expression and animates his body. Every bit the rebellious zealot Abel was primed to think he would be, Will breathes, “I saw him.”

“Where?”

“In Jack’s office.” Will looks away, conflicted. “He was…spying, I think. Dr. Bloom’s known the man he used for years and never noted any kind of change in him. He leads a perfectly stable life.”

“What about a long-term possession?” Abel’s suggestion earns him a skeptical look.

“What’s the longest you’ve ever seen one of them set up shop without getting found out?” Will waits, and Abel shakes his head. “I know Sitri once kept his guise for twelve years, and it was a feat, even for him.”

“Sitri was a voyeur and a deviant. He would have kept the act up much longer if his sights hadn’t wandered as they always were like to.”

Will’s eyebrows furrow and stay in a confused wrinkle. “Why do you use the past tense?”

Abel sighs. “It was nearly ten years ago now. They don’t _actually_ live forever, no matter what they like for us to believe.” He allows a few seconds for the facts to sink in, and they do, slowly. Abel goes on. “It was a very pathological thing, the way he went out. His pattern grew lazy, and he was discovered—not as he was, but as he was perceived to be at the time of his death.”

“Do you mean that a human killed him?”

It isn’t impossible. The likelihood of a death by one of their hands isn’t even astrological. Whether they come crashing down from the skies or crawling up from beneath the mud, there is always a chance just as there is for mankind. The expression on Will’s face isn’t disbelief; it’s closer to naked curiosity. “How did you find out?”

And so Abel tells him. He tells him what it’s like on the inside of a place like this one, constantly the subject of amusement and camaraderie for the buzzards circling the tank that’s become his home. “They have no wish to kill me, you understand. It’s about power and privilege, and it’s about humiliation.” He rubs his hands together. The chains drag and clink against the neighboring links and the dull, smooth tabletop. “Somewhere along the way, when the lightning that threw me still moved in my veins, one of them caught my scent—caught it and never tossed it to the wind.”

“They found you in here?” Will leans in confidentially. “One of the orderlies? Chilton?”

“No, my dear man, none of them. I’ve only ever seen Chilton hyped up on Arad once in his life, and he was just riding the tail end of it by then. Whoever got to him stayed well away from me.”

“So another prisoner?” Will shakes his head, asking, _Who got to you?_

“It was before all this.”

Will opens his mouth to speak and then stops, awareness flooding his expression and dimming his eyes rather than lighting them up the way Abel worried might happen. There’s something decent and _feeling_ about him still. There’s still hope for him not to end up faithless and lost like Abel or worse. Will swallows and whispers, “They came to the Vitalis home.”

“That they did.” Abel sighs, rolls his neck, and stares up at the ceiling, remembering. “You know what they call the slaughtering of our kind in the aftermath of ḫa-lam Supad? Do you know its real name?” 

“No one’s called it tanēhu for a thousand years.”

“No, and that’s because our like don’t talk about it, ever. We sweep it under the rug like it doesn’t happen because we’re ashamed that we never _do_ anything to help the ones who fall. That’s the _whole point_. We’re left at the mercy of humans—but most of the time, demons get to us first.

“We’ve adopted the Emesal word because a demon brands everything in terms of Emesal, and when we decided we weren’t going to acknowledge the atrocity of what we were and _weren’t_ doing, _their_ dialect became the only way to discuss what we now call _ḫa-lam Supad_.

“In the strongest years of Akkad, the country’s people spoke all the languages, and the city thrived—it was like Babel before God smashed its tower. Emesal was the speech of women and the goddess, Inanna; it was varied and served as camouflage for the ša lā ilāni.”

Will scoffs, casually interrupting Abel’s long-winded rant. This is how their conversations typically go. “The _godless_ hunt us in ḫa-lam because we are defenseless, which is a condition of damnation. If you were discovered years after your fall, that couldn’t have been ḫa-lam as we’ve come to know it. It’s not even tanēhu—maybe it is according to strict definition, but after the fact it’s nothing more than…”

Easily, Abel finishes his sentence with one word: “Murder.”

“Wait, but,” Will breathes around a morose frown, “in the file it said you killed them—it said you that did it.”

Abel stares at him for a long time, but Will doesn’t seem to understand. “You saw Ose the last time you were down. Do you remember what that was like?” Will doesn’t blush, but his eyes falter at the memory Abel can imagine well enough. “It wouldn’t have registered the same way since you weren’t as you are now, but I’d be surprised if he _didn’t_ give you ḫasīs when you were still dumu Aĝ.” 

“What is that supposed to mean?” Will protests, crossing his arms defensively.

“What, ḫasīs?” Abel blinks at Will, looking the part of the fallen, bewildered angel. “The deep touch, ninka. Possession.”

Will sighs and covers his face with his hands. “Don’t call me ninka. I’ve killed plenty of snakes but never for sustenance.”

“Haven’t you?”

“What do you mean, possession?” Will lifts his head to look at Abel, ignoring his rhetorical question. “Ose never _possessed_ me. It was never in his power to do so.”

“Think back,” Abel tells him in a light voice.

“I’m _always_ thinking back,” he mutters in a tight voice, eyes slinking off to the side and lingering on Matthew Brown through the glass wall.

Abel turns and sees the orderly swinging a large metal ring filled with keys. Chilton should really give the kid a break and upgrade to keycards, honestly. Matthew Brown stares at the key ring somersaulting around his index finger before alerting slowly to the feel of eyes on him. He looks first at Abel and then at Will, and then he drops his keys. Abel adjusts his hands on the table so he can lean his cheek in one palm while Matthew fumbles to get his keys and straighten out. He nods once at Will and gives Abel a severe glare—as severe as he can manage with his face flushed red like a tomato—before turning and facing the empty corridor again.

“That idiot has an unsavory appetite for dangerous men,” Abel mumbles, the words half-marred by the blade of his hand.

Regretfully, Will agrees, “Yes, I know.”

“Anyway, don’t change the subject.”

“I didn’t change the subject. There was never any _deep touch possession_ , whatever you want to call it. Nothing like that happened. It’s not possible for aḫḫāzu to…with…”

“Are you trying to avoid the word possession, or child of—”

“That one.” Will shrugs like it doesn’t matter either way, but Abel can tell that it does matter. “I don’t like it.”

Abel tries, “Enunnakkū?”

Will’s nose wrinkles. “The gods of the earth?”

“Well, yes. No?” Abel sighs at Will’s flat look and offers, “What about…šenmeû?” 

_That which always hears._

“Yeah, it’s better,” Will says quietly. He clears his throat. “But I’m telling you, what you’re suggesting just doesn’t happen.”

Abel leans forward, negotiating chain space with his elbow still propped up on the table. “I have it on good authority that it does.”

“Do you? When was the last time you were down here before you fell?”

“We don’t _get_ sent down will he nill he. You were an exceptional case because of your skillset that _no one_ else had. _You_ were sent to do a job that, since you botched it, every other mercenary sent down after you has failed miserably to get it done. Actually, you set a terrible precedence for everyone else, and not for the obvious, exciting reason.”

There’s a wrinkle in between Will’s eyebrows. “You were never sent down?”

“No, never.”

“Oh.” Will colors just under his jaw like he’s embarrassed for waving around the fact of his one experience on earth, wings and all. Abel doesn’t press the issue. He’s kind of entertained, truth be told. “Then, how would you know about ḫasīs?”

Abel tuts at his question. “In heaven it’s all about who you know. Not _every_ šenmeû sent after your old sweetheart—” Will rolls his eyes. “—bit the dust trying to take him down. Some of them came back, and when they did, they brought back all sorts of thrilling horror stories about the many gifts old Ose had in his repertoire. _One_ of them, among _many_ was his ability to jump into their clay and run amuck. His trade’s madness, after all; I wouldn’t expect anything less from the master.”

The way he’d heard it Ose forced their kind off his trail by sending the live ones packing with limbs and sanity scattered like a dropped bag of marbles. No one had seen or heard of him for almost forty years now—with the exception of Will’s assertion that he’d _met_ with him just before sailing off into a comatose sunset for nearly two months. Abel would bet money that Ose did it to him, but Will appears convinced that his descent was purely organic.

He won’t take that delusion from Will if that’s what he needs to keep his several-hundred-year old pipe dream alive. What he’s still carrying it around for, Abel’s sure he doesn’t know. Half the time there’s a steadfastness to Will like he hasn’t quite surrendered the lightning that spat him from heaven as if he were lukewarm and unfit for digestion. The other half of the time Will seems settled, as well as _happy_ to settle for human. He’s walking a dangerous line that Abel once walked. Sooner or later he’ll have to choose which side of the narrow wall to fall over.

“What else did they say he could he do?”

Abel opens his mouth to answer, but there’s a knock on the glass. They both turn to see Jack Crawford standing there with Matthew Brown lurking behind him, well out of the way but still very present. Crawford raises his eyebrows once at Will, and Will stands neatly, like a puppet on strings.

“There were murders in Minnesota, while I slept.”

“You weren’t sleeping,” Abel corrects him slowly. “You were in a coma.”

Will ignores his amendment. “There were only a handful then, but there are many now—dead girls.”

“So Jack Crawford expects you to divine the killer out of thin air.”

“Ripples in a pond,” Will tells him measuredly like he’s told him before. Locking eyes with Abel, he tells him, “I wish I could stay.”

Abel’s happy to hear it, but he says, firmly, “Go.”

Will nods and signals for Matthew to open the door. Crawford walks off with Will without giving Abel so much as a glance. He knows he gave Crawford something of a mixed first impression when he sat in to hear his and Will’s first real conversation, but the stuff of their long, impassioned talks don’t line up with Crawford’s interests. He’s concerned about the here-and-now; he wants only the information that’s going to serve Will best in his experience without wings, without everything that made him what he was.

Abel had started to become more than a guide for Will the more they talked. He became a confidante. More than talking, sometimes, he listened, and when it was Will’s turn to talk, counsel often proved unnecessary.

“Have a nice chat?” Matthew asks him as he’s carting Abel down the hall back to his cell.

“Oh, you know.” They traverse the halls in relative silence, and Abel says, “I hadn’t realized before, but you’re very keen on him, aren’t you?”

“Well, most people that aren’t Stephen from Archives these days catch my eye.”

Abel rolls his eyes. “There’s no reason to be _uncivil_ , Mr. Brown.”

“The day you practice what you preach, Gideon, maybe.”

Matthew leaves him in his cell, and things are quiet all day. Because he’s got a case, Abel isn’t surprised Will doesn’t come back to see him the next day or the day after. He’s content enough to have had one visit before things started to move in real time again, so he doesn’t let the silence get to him. Mostly he listens to MacCailín talking to one of the newer inmates who got moved into the cell adjacent to his. Abel likes hearing him talk, different as his accent is from everyone else’s.

Sometime within the same week but before the weekend, Chilton arranges to have all the patients in Abel’s block corralled into the cages in the main visiting room. It’s the biggest assembly of lunatics they’ve ever had in all of Abel’s time here in his hospital. He brings them all in and keeps some of them separated by an empty cage or in corners where they’ll only be exposed to one or two people.

It’s two parts a thought experiment and one part coercion. Chilton wants Abel to talk and give something away. He puts Abel in a cage facing the far window where he _knows_ there’s an especially efficient microphone laid along the cracked paneling that outlines the glass. To his left is an empty corner cage, and to his right is Conleth MacCailín. Behind him is the new guy MacCailín has been talking to for the past few days, and he can’t tell who else is positioned where, though he hears Falkenrath making a lot of racket on his side of the very noisy room. It’s like a mess hall, and actually, he wouldn’t trust Chilton’s mics to pick up the softer sounds underlying the booming, raucous noise the others are making.

They’re not used to gathering in large groups. Some of them, like Falkenrath and MacCailín, joke with the patients surrounding them, laughing loudly at their own humor. Others, like the new guy behind him, look around at everyone wildly and check with Chilton every few seconds to see if his presence and unwilling participation in the festivities will be punishable at a later time. Abel stays quiet. If one of his neighbors tried to speak to him, he would engage, but there’s no drive compelling him to start conversation where one isn’t already being inflicted upon him.

Chilton makes his rounds, and for a time, Matthew stands watch by the door like he was no doubt instructed to do. In his silence, Abel watches him. He watches the conflict clearly etched on his face and tracks its progression from turbulent dare to unhappy resignation. But then a change flutters over him, and his shoulders go rigid as if with determination.

Abel leans back against one wall of his cage with his back to the wall. He’s fully prepared to tune out aimless, long minutes of Matthew Brown fawning over Conleth MacCailín’s shameless flirtation with him when he hears footsteps approach his cell. A voice unmistakably belonging to Matthew Brown says, “Doctor.”

He turns so that he can see MacCailín’s reaction, but his expression is schooled and his eyes are trained on Matthew’s face. A patient man, then; Abel hadn’t guessed that about him.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Brown?”

“Chilton arranged this whole thing because he wants to know what _you_ know about Will Graham. You can start by telling me what you talk about for hours on end behind closed doors.” He lifts one shoulder, hardly even a shrug. “He’s asking the other patients if they’ve ever heard you say anything about him. It’s a great big cluster of a mess.”

“Whatever I say to Will Graham behind closed doors is our business.”

Matthew licks his lips, a curious gleam in his eye that gives Abel an unsettled feeling right in his gut. “Well, then. What about things _Chilton_ says to you where his very own wiretaps can pick up the conversation? Or is that privileged information, too? I seem to remember him _asking_ me on _several_ occasions to set up the taps.” He shrugs again, and the gesture is more fluid than mechanical. It makes him look boyish. “So he couldn’t mind me asking you now to elaborate, could he?” He whispers, a paragon of mischief, “It’s not like he did it in secret.”

Abel searches Matthew Brown’s eyes and stands up to be at level with his cold, unbending gaze. Cautiously, aware of what he’s dealing with, he warns the man standing in front of him, “If you remove my audio from the recordings, Chilton will know.”

“Maybe I’m counting on that.” Matthew hums once and deftly twirls the large ring of keys on his finger without looking down to follow the gesture with his eyes.

“You learn fast, don’t you?” Abel muses, feeling something like a frown dragging the corners of his mouth down even as the praise causes the face pointed at him to smirk. Covering his tracks as much as he needs to for the evidence they’re leaving in their wake, he adds, arbitrarily, “All that practice with wiretaps, you’d know exactly how to botch or alter a job.”

Chilton calls for Matthew’s attention and interrupts their staring match that Matthew usually loses by now. “Mr. Brown.”

As he’s turning to acknowledge his superior, tension in the back of his neck shivers and sags his shoulders—minutely enough that Matthew probably wouldn’t even have felt it. “Yeah, boss?”

“What are you doing over here? I remember asking you to stand watch by the door.”

“I…just…”

Abel stares at Matthew’s vacant, cloudy expression. MacCailín clears his throat perfunctorily and lifts his eyebrows once when Chilton and Matthew turn their eyes to him. “He came to see me, of course.”

Matthew blushes but doesn’t correct his testimony. He just gives Chilton a kind of helpless, embarrassed look and doesn’t say anything when he’s ordered back to his place by the door. Chilton storms off when Matthew doesn’t move to follow his order straight away. Matthew, for his part, just stands, swaying blearily on his feet—nearly six feet of disoriented, foggy human being. MacCailín reaches through the bars to grab his wrist when he wanders too close and leans into the bars. Abel hears him say in a wry, just barely audible voice, “You owe me, Brown.”

Satisfied with the small, flustered smile he gets for his troubles, MacCailín releases the stolen wrist and sits back in his cage, perfectly relaxed and unbothered. The frown on Abel’s face has not left him, and it will not. Behind him he hears the new guy murmuring, “Anyone can botch or alter a job.”

Abel turns and finds him stretching one arm behind his head with a dull look on his face. “Well,” the guy says, and it’s actually very helpful that Abel can’t think of his name right now since it’s not actually him, “this place is a disarrayed madhouse.”

“What were you expecting?”

“Something a little more civilized than iron _cages_. Are you animals?”

 _You. Are **you**_ animals? Non-inclusive. 

Swapping his frown out for a smile, Abel muses, “I’ve often asked myself the same question about you.”

That he means the inclusive “you” is implied. His neighbor steps forward and holds the bars with both hands, face a perfect mask of cool indifference. He says, “We are whatever we want to be.”

“What are you today?”

“You see what I am.” His smirk is jagged at one end, making the line of teeth against his lips look like a serrated blade. Calculated with every word and almost speaking in a rhythm, he whispers, “ _Oh_ , don’t you _see_.”

_Oh, see. Ose._

He feels a single pang of fear and then nothing. If all that he’s heard about this being willfully sitting in the cage behind his is true, _Ose_ can change what the microphones pick up of their speech, how they sound, how Chilton hears them, whether they record at all…if he wanted he could kill the power now and plunge them into darkness. They haven’t had dinner yet. It would throw the place into chaos.

“I didn’t come to hear you tell me about Will Graham,” he coos. His eyes slide away from Abel’s and off in the direction of the empty corner cage. “I came to speak for myself.”

“What?”

“Abel Gideon,” Chilton announces his name, sounding appropriately weary.

He started at the inner cages and worked his way out in a clockwise spiral. Abel was positioned to be his last stop on purpose. It was the most comprehensive way for him to gather information before coming to Abel directly. It made Matthew an easy, predictable target: susceptible to distraction and manipulation, not quickly observed for Chilton’s patterned preoccupation.

Once he abandoned Matthew for a host, his current body—having already been perused by Chilton—proved to be of better use. Abel opens his mouth to speak and doesn’t feel the moment he slips away from himself, though _his_ voice leaves _his_ body and sounds eloquent enough for the lag deep within.

Behind him the man that kept Ose begins to wail and snarl profanities while he beats on the metal slats of his cage. Abel can hear his meaty fists thudding and thudding as if through an oppressive fog.

“Clear these men out,” Chilton calls. “Back to their cells for dinner! Let’s go, people. Not him.”

He points at Abel, and his body sits obediently in a manner that he thinks he himself would sit, probably. The cacophony of over a dozen people moving and unlatching locks clatters over him like hail pelting the metallic roof of a car, and the presence waiting and stirring in his chest festers, real and solid like a heart murmur.

 _He didn’t lie to you,_ a voice that’s all brambles and the sullen crackle of coals burning whispers into his mind, bypassing his eardrums and shuddering hard in his lungs, in his gut, in his thalamus…it’s all-consuming. Abel’s felt it before, but that it’s happening to him now makes him ashamed of all the other times he gave his consent to be used this way—of the times he traded the shell of himself for the goings-on in the ether that was no longer his to touch. Tailing all of his humiliating thoughts of self-loathing and chagrin, Ose punctures the tangled net of his thoughts to say to him, _I never gave Mal’ak ḫasīs._

_He didn’t know how to want it when I knew him in our first life together. You never know how to want anything, whether you’re alive or fallen or healed from your disgrace. It’s why we kill you when news of your falling finds our ears. We kill you because you can’t want, and because altruism is a lie in this realm. But you know that, Kamael, don’t you? You know that you are a beast among men without your **Supad** to coddle you. _

None of his scathing remarks wound, but at the same time that all of it leaves him, slow, ruinous horror builds in him the farther down the binding hurls him. Chilton comes back to stand in front of him and Abel’s entire life has trickled past him a hundred thousand times.

It has all been exposed and searched and vandalized. Every encounter he oversaw in heaven, the blinding heat and searing pain of the fall, the Vitalis family, his life as a mortal man, a twisting collapse into gruesome violence, a court ruling, the hospital, doctors, endless prescriptions, crude therapy, chains scraping on a table, _ninka_ , Mal’ak ha-Mashḥit, Mal’ak ha-Mashḥit, Mal’ak ha-…

Someone named Kamael. Someone named Ose.

Someone named Katya.

Everything remains in place but not intact. It’s as if he’s been blind all his life, and a stranger came in the night to move all his things around, rearranging the furniture in a hasty, senselessly cruel act. It’s all his to access, and at the same time, none of it belongs to him. None of it is where he left it. He floats in a void of noise and jumbled, empty memories.

“It’s very simple, Gideon, you tell me what I want to know, and I won’t have you shipped off to a different hospital on the other side of the country.”

“Is that supposed to appeal to my humanity, Doctor?” he hears himself say—sees his own hands moving as he stands in one easy, simple motion. “Threatening to put me in some castle far, far away where my prince can’t retrieve me?”

“How else to threaten a man with nothing than to take the one illusion he has of friendship,” Chilton says blandly.

“You think Will Graham is my friend?”

“Do you?” Chilton laughs, finding some of his energy and livening up, but only by a bit. “I must say he comes around often enough to give mixed signals, but clearly, he’s roped you into the same ride he’s taken Jack Crawford for.”

“Which ride would that be, _Frederick_?” Abel feels himself sneering. “Conspiracy theories, or malicious automatism?”

Chilton’s lip twitches at one side like he only just refrains from outright snarling. “You listen to me…”

“Or _you_ could listen to me, seeing as you’ve been so impatient to meet me.”

The thrill shivering sinuously just beneath Abel’s sternum is not an effect of his doing. It goes on. The moment drags. Chilton’s face blanks with shock and then tightens with anticipation and something that sticks in Abel’s nose and distinctly _smells_ of fear. Chilton’s voice quivers. “Abel?”

“Not at the moment, Doctor.”

Chilton’s eyes widen comically, and he staggers a step away from the cage. He turns his head but doesn’t take his eyes off Abel’s for a second when he yells, “Matthew, the key!”

Ose plasters Abel’s front right up against the wall of the cage and whispers, voice urgent and low, “Our mutual friend doesn’t call himself Ose. He doesn’t call himself Will Graham either. His name is _Barbas_. You don’t remember it because she was using you to speak to _me_ , and that’s when she said _my_ name.”

Chilton trembles to have the truth there before him, stripped completely to its most essential parts—though exactly half of it is a slanderous lie.

“ _She_ …” Chilton breathes, and Matthew drops the keys. “You’re not—”

“Barbas is the one you want,” Ose hisses as Matthew recovers the keys and tries the wrong one. Abel’s insides go taut like a wire with distress. Matthew spends enough time twirling the damn things, he should know which one is which. Abel is sure he knows. He must be ragged still from his brief time as Arad. Abel sympathizes at least, but then he gets the right key, and Abel forgets about things like sympathy and affinity. All he can see or understand is the latch on the door slotting out of place, and Ose saying in their combined voices, “Do _not_ trust Will Graham.”

The door sings open, and four hands catch him as he’s falling, falling. He falls forever and a day.

When he wakes, it’s in the infirmary. His heartbeat is beeping at him on a monitor, and one of his wrists cuffed to the gurney supporting him. There’s a nurse in the room with him that he’s seen before, but it’s just the two of them. She hums, and he breathes; there is an oxygen mask strapped over his face. He wonders if perhaps he’s had a heart attack. It feels like he has.

Ose is gone. Abel has a way out if he wants it, but the path is not without its obstacles.

Her name might be Mary. He doesn’t think she’s married, but the staff here generally likes her. Some strange, unburied part of him wants her to look like Katya. It takes him a moment to remember _who_ Katya is, and for a few frightening, traumatic seconds he convinces himself that she _is_ Katya, the very same one who died on Thanksgiving some years ago. It’s blurry. All of it’s damn blurry. Slippery, slipping…

There’s a small object in between his fingers that nearly falls out of his hand when he lets go of the tension there. He tests the smooth metal that’s been warmed by his skin. He has no memory of putting it there, doesn’t know where it came from.

But he thinks he knows why.

_That’s when she said my name._

The nurse hums, and he’s sure that her name is Katya. He inches the little piece of metal into the keyhole on the one handcuff chaining him in place.

_Barbas is the one you want._

_Do not…_

He pushes the mask away from his mouth and slowly, silently sits up.

_Trust…_

_Will Graham._

Abel blinks his eyes open to a chafing sensation irritating his palms and the soft undersides of his fingers. There’s a corpse draining itself of blood at his feet, like an offering. He tries to blink the sight away and can only see that bloody evening that destroyed his life as he once knew it. The tile twists into the awful, nappy rug Katya’s parents had in their house that he used to run over barefoot as an untouchable child. When he faded and started to grow, he had to wear his shoes in the house to combat the stickers everyone else brought in that he simply didn’t feel in the beginning.

It’s like that now. He’s been rubbed raw, and until he comes down from his distant cloud, he will not feel this. He doesn’t know what _this_ is. Part of him feels like he won’t ever know, won’t ever feel again.

_Our mutual friend doesn’t call himself Ose. He doesn’t call himself Will Graham either._

Abel remembers the name ninka, remembers Will telling him not to call him that. He remembers Will saying he was no mongoose and that he hated the sound of his name. Abel can hear himself saying the same thing about the name the Vitalis family picked for him when he was much younger than he is now.

_But I’m telling you, what you’re suggesting just doesn’t happen._

An angel doesn’t consort with a demon. Maybe two fallen do, and maybe two demons do. Will can’t be fallen because Abel isn’t fallen. He would know if…wouldn’t he know if…yes, he would have to know if…

_Do **not** trust Will Graham. _

_His name is Barbas._

Staring at the body before him does a crazy thing to Abel’s mind. It makes him feel like he’s flying through space, unlatched like an unlocked door. He looks around the room to keep himself from sinking down to the floor beside the death he made and searches for something that makes sense to his scrambled senses. The pole lodged in the body is still in his hand like a scepter or a spear. He looks around for more like it, a memory blazing in his mind like an ember caught on the wind.

It’s like a flicker of a childhood he didn’t live or snippets of a borrowed experience—maybe nothing more than a photo from an old book. With a creeping, profound sense of disappointment, he sees that it is all of the above. The several-times impaled body is a re-enactment. Another crime he didn’t make. 

Except this one _is_ his. It has to be. 

It’s his, but the ownership of the memory is someone else’s. Even the display, while unoriginal to begin with, is not his doing. He wouldn’t have chosen Wound Man. When he thinks about it, he can’t fathom why he did it except that it felt vaguely familiar, like an old coat that fits but that he’s never once worn before. There’s terror attached to it, but that doesn’t feel like his either, so he releases it and holds onto the highest-reaching pole to keep himself from floating away. Somebody finds him before he can summon the willpower or the courage to flee.

In his cell he waits and breathes and hears himself saying, _It’s a terrible thing to have your identity taken from you._

Abel waits in fog for the pieces to slot back together, but they don’t. Nothing fits. Nothing makes sense.

Will Graham comes to see him some day after the murder he made, but he doesn’t know Will Graham or why he should care about a girl called Abigail Hobbs whose life he saved. He doesn’t know him when Will tries to tell him, bottom lip quivering only enough for him to see it, _It’s ninka. I’m ninka, remember?_

Abel doesn’t know who Kamael is or why Will whispers the word outside his cell after his “backroom privileges” have been revoked indefinitely. Chilton stands right at Will’s shoulder like a gargoyle on a spire, and Will ignores him for the most part, but even Abel can see that there’s a world of things he isn’t telling him. It doesn’t hurt. He isn’t to be trusted. _They_ , Will Graham and Chilton jointly, are not to be trusted.

Kamael doesn’t exist. _Not at the moment, Doctor._

_I didn’t come to hear you tell me about Will Graham. I came to speak for myself._

Abel doesn’t know who that is. He can’t convince himself that he ever did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From _Hannibal_ : S1 E11, “Rôti” – “Terrible thing to have your identity taken from you.”
> 
> From Revelation 3:16 – “But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!”
> 
> Also from “Rôti” – “Somebody got inside his head and moved all the furniture around.”
> 
> And finally, from “Rôti” again – “It’s like remembering something from your childhood, and you’re not sure if it’s your memory or a friend’s memory, and then you realize, sadly, it’s just some photo in an old book.”
> 
> A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=-qIuVCsRb98C&pg=PA110&lpg=PA110&dq=hassu+akkadian&source=bl&ots=BqahzuTTGC&sig=Gj5o9BcOua2eZRkYcrJBJWAOqrc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FwC6U67KF86Bqgbs64DwAw&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=hassu%20akkadian&f=false
> 
> Review of all Emesal / Akkadian / Babylonian words (in alphabetical order):  
> Aḫḫāzu – demon  
> Arad – slave, servant  
> Dumu Aĝ – child of heaven  
> Enunnakkū – the gods of the earth and the netherworld  
> Ĝissu – shade, shadow; protection > an aegis  
> Ḫa-lam – (to be) bad, evil; to forsake, forget; to destroy  
> Ḫasīs – comprehension, wisdom  
> Ninka – mongoose  
> Ša lā ilāni – godless, impious, ungodly  
> Šenmeû – gods that constantly hear, listen  
> Supad – shepherd  
> Tanēhu – lament


	10. I Call Him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will copes with changes in his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _My mother used to tell me I should take it slow / The pace is not what matters, it’s the direction that you go / Keep your feet upon the path and your eyes upon the goal / You’ll have all the joy a heart could ever hold_
> 
>  
> 
> There will be time, there will be time   
> To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;   
> There will be time to murder and create,   
> And time for all the works and days of hands   
> That lift and drop a question on your plate;   
> Time for you and time for me,   
> And time yet for a hundred indecisions,   
> And for a hundred visions and revisions,   
> Before the taking of a toast and tea.  
> -T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

“What did it feel like, when you killed him?” Dr. Lecter asks, sitting perfectly still and relaxed in his seat across from Will’s.

He’s having some trouble adjusting. Every time he sees Dr. Lecter now, his mind briefly supplies him a different image—a different face to own the voice attached to the words he sometimes hears and sometimes misses. Dr. Lecter’s been patient enough with him, and understandably rattled. Everything they went through with Garrett Jacob Hobbs dimmed the shock of his possession for all parties involved. It was, admittedly, not as private as perhaps the bewildered doctor would have liked, but he handled it and _is_ handling it. Will felt, and feels, strangely proud of his composure.

Seeing Dr. Lecter so focused, calm, and quite nearly regal in his adulthood, for Will, is the most gracious, merciful thing God ever could have given him. Like a child crippled from birth later healed from his ailment, Hannibal Lecter exists for him as the splendid imago woven out of his most hopeful, unlikely dreams transformed into reality. It is a fitting consolation for what he lost in the doctor’s place.

“Will?”

“Hmm?”

Lecter leans forward so his elbows rest on his thighs. Will studies the round points his knees make through the pleated trousers and bounces his foot gently, restlessly. He doesn’t want to talk about Garrett Jacob Hobbs—not for pathological reasons; he just doesn’t want to talk about him.

_It was a very pathological thing, the way he went out,_ Kamael had said to him the last time they really spoke. That was before he killed that nurse and all but forgot who Will was. That was before.

“Are you all right?” Dr. Lecter asks gently. There’s concern in his eyes, but he’s cool, aloof. Will likes him best that way. He can’t be leeched or conversely influenced. No push or pull in either direction. “Much has happened in the past few weeks, to both of us.” He checks Will’s face as if gauging for a tell. Will supposes he probably doesn’t find one because his next guess branches off into a slightly different direction, away from both of them: “Would you like to discuss Abel Gideon?”

Will swallows, the sound of it clicking dryly in the back of his mouth. He says, “There’s nothing to discuss.”

“Isn’t there,” Dr. Lecter asks without there really being a question or even a hint of doubt to the statement. “He was your friend.”

He thinks of the simultaneous wilt and craze in Kamael’s eyes the last time he went to see him so he could tell him about Abigail Hobbs. There was nothing there when Will tried to talk to him. He can’t speak in definite terms, but maybe nothing will ever be there again. Chilton took Arad in stride when it struck him. It stayed in his system for a meager stretch of time, and then the effects passed on, leaving him with something akin to aftershocks in the seconds following an earthquake. Whatever hit Kamael devastated him. It made him kill that nurse.

Will knows that’s what happened, though Chilton refused to tell him anything. He almost barred Will from the hospital entirely and would have if Jack had not been there. Matthew might have told him something, but he was nowhere to be seen, and the one time Will called him to ask, he didn’t answer the phone.

“I’m steadily convincing myself that he isn’t anymore,” Will answers, remembering that convention states he should reply to politely-worded questions. Never mind that he really would rather leave it alone. Vague conversation, though, he can manage. They have time to whittle down: twenty five minutes of it, to be exact. “I hear it said often that a person’s company is a reflection of his character. Do you think that’s true, Doctor?”

“Reflections measure only those things that we can see, and appearances can be deceiving. What is the fundamental difference between a volunteer at a homeless shelter and the homeless veteran to whom she serves dinner every evening? How do we judge one from the other?”

They’re rhetorical questions, but Will feels the need, still, to answer them. “Their individual histories and each person’s intentions,” he says quietly. “The difference is that they’re people, separate from their situations, whatever those may be.”

“If you feel this way, why worry what people will think of your alliance with an unsavory character? He never offended you the way it was taken for granted that he would.”

It wasn’t an offense, what happened to Kamael. He couldn’t be held accountable for it, but no one else could be either, not really. Will isn’t taking it like a personal blow. He can’t think of anything more selfish than to call what was done to his brother an attack on himself, the consulting agent, or on Mal’ak ha-Mashḥit, the fallen one. Jack wants him distanced from all that made him divine, but it’ll take some time and a hell of a lot more bargaining before he assimilates completely. He’ll find a way to be smart without being self-sacrificing; he’ll find a way to be compassionate without giving his whole heart away to someone who can’t possibly be trusted to keep it.

Whether it’s a man called Abel Gideon or a girl named Abigail Hobbs, whether it’s a creature born out of hell damned to run from him for all eternity…he can’t lose himself again. He can’t.

“Abel Gideon gave me a sense of what it was like to grow into this life, to accept it for what it is.” Will drops his eyes and slowly rubs his hands together. “That he couldn’t accept it after all is the thing that bothers me.”

Cautiously, though the details have been suggested to him before, Dr. Lecter says, “As you believe it, he _was_ like you _are_.”

Will gives his doctor an unblinking look. “He was interfered with.”

Something quivers across Lecter’s face. It almost looks like fear, but it’s closer to revulsion, plain and simple. “Do you mean…like…?”

Will nods once, immediately sorry for not handling the matter with more finesse—that seemingly innate but actually learned skill humans so often must use when dealing with tender subjects. Emotion, he’s observed, can make people act out of turn. Will is angry, perhaps, but it isn’t Dr. Lecter’s fault. The same thing that hit Kamael hit him, too. No one had given him Ose’s name in association with the murder at Chilton’s hospital, but Will has abilities outside of those that the lightning left him intact with.

Ose hadn’t refrained from torturing and killing him like the others who were sent after him because of the mere fact of his identity or of the skin that was chosen for him. They’d done what they did because flesh didn’t matter to them.

The paramount variable to them had always been an intangible, viciously painful link much like the missing band that forever keeps two lashing chains wildly unanchored. Their paths ran like planetary bodies traveling along preordained orbits that never changed yet scarcely intersected in the course of their lives. And when they did clash, it was never with predictability. Someone always suffered for their stolen time, and the consequences were always grave. It was a thing that should never have come to pass.

Will is ashamed to even think it, but he wouldn’t trade the penance he served. If he could go back, he would own the empty, char-black silence that was his debt to pay. He would relive it again and again for as many lifetimes as he needed to if it meant going back.

It was the most beautiful, and the most horrific, time of his life. The scars had faded considerably, but he felt them still. There was no way he could forget what they felt like, raised on his skin long before the clamor of tanēhu and long before he knew what real pain was or how it could shatter a person from the inside out. He could remember, vividly, how that old touch felt, not weighted by ḫasīs like Kamael suspected. It was light, soothing; a provocation and a tantalizing invitation. It was sin, and God help him—God _forgive_ him—but he loved it.

“It would seem I can no longer afford to be skeptical of your situation,” Dr. Lecter says softly, eyes lost somewhere over Will’s shoulder when he blinks out of his speckled memories that it would only heal him to forget. Lecter ignores or doesn’t notice Will’s attempt to catch his eyes.

Whether it’s Arad hanging around in his system or something Ose left with him, similar to the webs Barbas left with Chilton, Will can’t place. He’s foggy, a strange thing to see on his face, though Will hasn’t seen much of him, all told. The last image of Hannibal Lecter he had in his mind before dropping to earth and seeing him in the flesh was that of a young boy, freezing and half-dead somewhere in a Lithuanian wilderness.

The last time he saw Lecter’s face, he was a child, hollowed out and only just clinging to biological life. It was the first and last time he endeavored to murder outside of those sanctioned by the natural and divine laws that kept the ichor fresh within him. His calling was the thing that animated what which was lasting and eternal within him—fueled his whole universe and kept the quicksand around him from swallowing him whole.

He’d tried to murder that little boy in the snow—tried to save him from a future it didn’t seem he could find without his sister. But his order had been for the girl, Mischa. The boy, Hannibal, was none of his business. It was not his concern. He should not have interfered.

His calling should have driven his obedience. It was not his right to choose but to be chosen for _others_ who were chosen. He had no right to Hannibal Lecter. Knowing he was out of line did nothing to stop him. It was the same thing that pushed him to pull the trigger on Garrett Jacob Hobbs. Saving someone else—showing another human being mercy, even if the ripples would follow him forever—was the right choice. Wasn’t it the right choice?

“How did you know that you would find him there, in Chilton’s hospital?” Dr. Lecter asks, disturbing the clanging well of Will’s thoughts that he’d fallen down like a rabbit hole—a reference he can make because of Jimmy’s reading _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ to him in the hospital, which he’d begun to do in secret after he noticed Brian bringing books Will’s fourth week comatose.

Will thinks about how to explain the beacon Kamael made for him completely unwittingly and decides on drawing a comparison. He murmurs, “We were like two magnets.”

Lecter jumps on his description, which, inexplicably, tickles Will very much. “You mean you were attracted to him, as if there were a gravitational pull between you?”

“No, the other way around.” Will presses the point of his finger into the armrest thoughtfully. “He repelled me.”

Like the concept completely enraptures and intrigues him, Dr. Lecter leans forward in his seat and plants both feet on the floor. “Like heat from an enormous fire?”

“Ripples in a pond,” Will replies, almost sleepily. “The closer you are to the impact of the thing causing the waves, the more immediately it rushes into you, all resistance and blind momentum. It’s like the smoke that when it gets into your lungs you can only stagger back and gasp for clean air.”

“Fascinating.” Lecter almost smiles.

Will saves him the trouble and smirks down at his lap. “I could say the same thing about you.”

Now Lecter does smile, very small. “Me, Will, or the entirety of the human race?”

“Yes,” he answers because the only answer is yes.

Evenly but with a mild peppering of humility, Dr. Lecter says, “I wonder how you can believe that when there are beings who exist outside of our comfortable, tiny worlds that we know nothing at all about—when you have experienced so much that we could not even begin to comprehend.”

“You’ve encountered strife of your own.” Will ducks his head and bites his lip, thinking, wondering, daring himself to be brave, and daring himself not to think of it as bravery but as honesty and selflessness. It’s a challenge for him, still, to see past the sunken, catatonic face that burned its likeness into his memory for years. He musters up the courage to begin and then flees from the ledge, afraid—miserably and unforgivably afraid. “All of humanity has,” he adds, a clear cop-out, as Beverly would say.

How could he say to this man who had made something of himself and triumphed over the atrocity of his sister’s death that he, the one now sired Will Graham, had been the one to whisk her away from that short life they shared together? He had nearly been the death of Hannibal Lecter that morning when the soldiers discovered him dragging the evidence of his bondage with him in his vacant eyes, in the blood flaked under his nails, and in the hypovolemic shock he’d survived that any halfway competent doctor would have diagnosed as a complication brought about by severe dehydration.

He doesn’t think there’s a way to have that conversation. Even if there is, he isn’t sure he wants to have it. Someday, he’s hoping, he will be strong enough to risk destroying whatever rapport they manage to build for the sake of honoring Mischa Lecter’s memory. And anyway, the truth will out. At least he has always believed that, even as everything else he deigns to have faith in goes to shit, as Brian would say.

“I went to see Abigail yesterday,” Will mumbles, hopelessly floundering for a new topic and knowing he can trust this one to mean something to both of them. Judging by the spark of interest in Lecter’s eyes, his instincts are not misguided.

“Was she much the same as the last time you were there?”

“Yeah, the doctor couldn’t tell me much. I just sat with her for a while and read to her a bit.”

“What did you select for the visit?” Lecter asks, head tilting and lips twitching just a fraction into a curious smile.

Will looks away, hoping to hide the heat blossoming in his face and up his neck. He says, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

“Brian Zeller had that book with him the day you woke up,” Lecter supplies, probably not ignorant of Will’s red face but kindly not acknowledging it all the same. “Were you hoping for a repeat act of divinity from those angels still occupying heaven?”

“I woke up before he could finish it,” he explains, a wide smile stretching across his face. Will notes, with some odd, near pride, that Lecter’s eyes soften at the sight. Whispering, quite incidentally, he tells him, “I never had any friends up there.”

His eyes glint, strangely and conspiratorially. “Not even your Heavenly Father?”

“Is it a custom for parents to befriend their children, down here?” Will’s smile sharpens at the corners into a smirk. “That certainly isn’t traditional, even if it has become the norm.”

“Not many things that fill that slot adhere to tradition,” Lecter counters. “We must always change this arena we have claimed for ourselves, or we will never be able to accept that time can only remain the same, no matter what we do to make our experiences more unique.”

“I want that to be true,” Will says softly, “that time doesn’t change.”

And Lecter’s smile disappears, turns down into the smallest frown. “I believe it is true.”

“Speaking of time…”

The smile returns, more implied than outright and less polite than casually given out of distraction. “Yes. There is just enough left for me to see you out.”

Will rises and makes for the door. “Think there’ll come a day when there’s not enough time?”

“It is all illusory anyway. Man created time so he could _keep_ it, just like he built the clock so he could contain the trick rather than learn its constructs and commit them to memory.” Lecter opens the door for him and stands to the side of it, his arm hidden by the lavish wood. He adds, “And besides, you are my final appointment for the day. From the moment you step into my office, the arbitrary cells we maintain comprised of hours, minutes, and seconds affect only us. The elapsed time is simply a charade we enforce by allowing it to govern our behavior.”

A few seconds tick by slowly, Will on the other side of the threshold with one foot over the dividing line and Lecter studying him from his place adjacent to the door. Will titters, hard pressed to call the sound he makes tittering, and his doctor cracks a smile, sharing with Will in the joke.

He can’t tell him the truth. There’s no doubt in his mind that Lecter would hate him if he knew, that telling him would only drudge up terrible memories of a history better off if left forgotten. But, maybe…?

Will knows a little something about hard truths and deep, traumatic wounds that don’t ever heal the right way. If Lecter knew something about Ose from the short time he’d been occupied by the smoke and ash being he can’t ever let go of even as he knows he’ll be forced to—if he had retained even a memory as Chilton had retained so _much_ confused knowledge of Barbas to go so far as to think that _Will_ was Ose…

“Wait,” he breathes, stopping the door with his palm when Lecter starts to shut it after Will’s back is turned. “Wait, I’m sorry, I…”

He hadn’t even thought to ask.

That first day in the hospital when he awoke and Lecter came into his room, the question hadn’t even entered into his mind. There he was, standing there, and Will couldn’t detect even a trace of Ose inhabiting him any longer. He’d felt something like a gaping hole in his chest, like the ground had been ripped out from under his feet. It was like being abandoned—it must have been what Ose felt when Will, then known to him intimately as _Akh_ , had been yanked away and into the sky like a toy in a claw machine worth little more than a quarter to the one who took him out of their small, beautiful, disastrous life together.

Lecter must have had questions, too, though he never asked either. Maybe it just hadn’t occurred to him like it hadn’t occurred to Will. He should ask—he should…

The door opens wider, and Will’s hand slides down the polished wood as it goes. Lecter’s voice is concerned when he asks, “Will, what is it?”

“I…” His mouth goes dry. If he can’t be selfless, he should at least commit to honesty, to bravery. He swallows once and drops his hand to his sides, both of them balling into nervous, trembling fists. The cadence of his voice is panicked and nearly hysterical when he grits out in a stalled, but determined rush, “Do you remember anything, from…from when he used you to get to me?”

Dr. Lecter watches Will’s face with some foreign tenderness written clearly across his own, something dangerously akin to mercy in the worried set of his brow. He names the one Will called _he_ : “Your Ose?”

_My Ose,_ Will lets himself think, delighting for just a moment in the horrible thrill and ecstatic buzz it puts in and under his skin. It makes his muscles ache as if with exertion and forces his blood move quicker like a fast-acting drug injected directly into his veins. His fingers uncurl and his shoulders droop. He whispers, ashamed that he knows _why_ he whispers this time, “Yes.”

Lecter blinks a few times and drops his gaze somewhere near Will’s throat, looking through him more than he’s looking _at_ him. His fair eyebrows draw together, remembering, or maybe willing himself to forget.

“Will you come back inside?” he suggests, eyes still pointed low, nearer the vicinity of Will’s shoulder.

“Okay,” Will tries to say, though his throat only makes an awkward rasping sound in place of the first syllable and the second doesn’t get voiced at all. He nods instead and steps back through the doorway when the door into the office opens for him a third time.

“Would you care for a drink?” Lecter offers, already making for his desk. Will follows and nods yes when their eyes meet. He has a deep appreciation for wine already that everyone had, quite adorably, expected him to hate from the very first taste, and Lecter’s already picked up on his advanced palate. They have a kindred love for wine, it would seem. “Red or white?”

“Red, please.”

Dr. Lecter pours two glasses and brings one to Will. “Of course, you will not be billed for this time.”

Will tips his head gratefully and raises his glass. “To the illusion.”

“To the truth behind it,” Lecter toasts back, delicately clinking their glasses. “And all its consequences.”

He drinks, and Will does, too, eager but biting back his questions in favor of letting the silence smother his curiosity. Will follows Lecter to the window, and they look out together, the former at the latter’s shoulder and less than half a step behind him. The wine in his glass is almost purple, a bruised, lovely kind of red Will has seen so many places and so many lives before the fleeting, always shifting moment only capable of being called _now _.__

__“I remember darkness,” he hears murmured into the lip of Dr. Lecter’s glass. Will’s eyes flick down to track the movement of Lecter’s hand as it disappears quickly and jerkily into his pocket, fingers crushed into a tight, trembling fist. “I remember looking into your eyes when you spoke that name for the first time—not in Jack Crawford’s office; the very first time.”_ _

__Will sees Lecter blink once, hard, like he’s trying to get something out of his eye. He turns that concentrated expression on Will, and he looks perfectly amazed and confused and stunned at everything, at the impossibility of the thread in his possession. It is a key into the past and an open window that all he has to do to see through, is lean forward just a bit further and surrender his balance. The trade for wisdom has always been a loss of footing; a disruption of equilibrium to mimic the teetering scales measuring the natural order of things. Will watches Lecter cross that line with a slow, shivering kind of pleasure that he should not feel but absolutely, irrevocably does._ _

__Dr. Lecter swallows once and says, “I was somewhere else, somewhere…half-wild with tropical heat and unrestrained energy coursing through the air, like waves of gasoline fumes washing over me except fresh, more…” Lecter drops his eyes, the two hazel-black rings searching the space between them for the memory to recreate itself so that both of them can see it. He shakes his head. “It was…more; more than I think I know how to describe.”_ _

__Will wants to teach him the word Arad or to tell him what Kamael said about ḫasīs, but Lecter wouldn’t know what he was talking about. They can talk about lore and logistics some other night. Tonight Will is being selfish. Maybe it’s what he’s best at. The time to care about it has come and gone._ _

__“You looked just the same as you do on this night,” Lecter says in a small voice with a slight grimace on his face that Will understands perfectly, though he actively keeps himself from mirroring it. “And I saw—myself, or the person whose eyes I saw through, watching you.” He laughs wetly, eyes moving to stare out the window again as he takes a long drink of his wine. “You were looking for me, and you couldn’t see me. I was there, staring straight at you, and you couldn’t see me—” Dr. Lecter clears his throat. “I should say that _he_ was staring straight at you, but you understand me well enough, I think.”_ _

__Will nods, not obtuse enough, unfortunately, to ignore the irony. How could he, even if Dr. Lecter makes no attempt to point it out to him. He’d failed to detect Ose in Jack’s office, too. They’d shaken hands, and Will wouldn’t have known him from Adam if his face hadn’t flickered for those few pivotal seconds and turned his world upside down._ _

__“There are thoughts attached to the memory, but as they are in a language I do not speak, I couldn’t repeat them to you.” Lecter swishes the wine in his glass, upturned palm swiveling from side to side with the careful, slight movement. He nods his head with a petite bunching up of his shoulders. “I _can_ tell you of the frustration attached to those thoughts.”_ _

__Will brings his eyes from the window. His mouth quivers, on the verge of laughter. “Frustration?”_ _

__“I think he wanted to be ruled by you,” he murmurs, closing his eyes and sucking in a breath to calmly clarify: “In much the same way that a warrior yearns for an honorable death on the battlefield by a worthy opponent.”_ _

__There’s a knot twisting painfully in Will’s stomach. He’s a selfish rot of a disgraced angel. Ose is every bit as selfish, rotten, and far from grace as Will has become in his decadence. Damn it all. It helps no one to pretend to be modest. Lecter watched him take a life even as he saved one. There’s no point in hiding something so innocent as curiosity. He’s beginning to wonder why he should hide anything from the people in his life anymore. They know his shame and his great, blasphemous pride. All that’s left is the long, persistent ache of delight he’s kept buried within himself like a resplendent treasure to be preserved for a generation not yet even born._ _

__All this in mind, Will asks, “Is that the only way?”_ _

__Lecter doesn’t grow shy or embarrassed. He doesn’t interpret Will’s inquiry as crude or distasteful. He only looks curious. “Do you mean to ask if he harbored affection for you? Truly?”_ _

__Because he’s selfish and because he cannot let go of the past that ruined him and because he’s positive that there will be no other end for them than death at each other’s hand, he takes a deep breath, steels himself, and answers, “Yes.”_ _

__“All that I saw, Will…” Lecter shakes his head vaguely, shoulders lifting in a helpless shrug. “I couldn’t tell you one way or another.”_ _

__Will isn’t disappointed, not exactly. He’d expected as much, but it had felt worth it to at least try. “And in Jack’s office, do you remember anything about that?”_ _

__“Yes,” he murmurs, eyes drifting closed like the black of his eyelids will take the memory from him. “Something went into you. Part of it, part of that darkness…”_ _

__Will searches his face, but Dr. Lecter doesn’t open his eyes. “What do you mean?”_ _

__He starts to say something but stops, eyes fluttering open and pinning Will instantly. There’s awareness there, a razor sharp acuity that Will hadn’t been even peripherally concerned about but that now worries him deeply. Only worsening his tentative dread, Dr. Lecter remarks, flatly, “You knew what he was doing the moment it touched you, and you did nothing to stop him.”_ _

__“I couldn’t—I…”_ _

__They watch each other in a battle of wills. Taking a quick breath in and out, Will steps back, clutching his half-emptied glass too tightly but careful not to squeeze where he knows the bowl would snap under pressure. He’s prepared for a litany of stern reprimands and harsh warnings and _judgment_. But Dr. Lecter only looks…curious._ _

__“There was nothing you could have done?” he fills in for Will when he makes no move to finish his aborted sentence. “You had no way to defend yourself in the state you were in?”_ _

__There’s a long list of excuses to which Will could plausibly lay claim. He would just have to name one, and Lecter would accept it for the truth, even if he knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. Will’s answer would not be challenged. He could leave now, flee the office he pleaded to be invited back into, and never again revive the subject for discussion. Lecter would let him. He would let him get away with his cowardice and his lies, and he wouldn’t ask if the loss of his wings when he fell deteriorated his backbone, too._ _

__So Will chooses, as is his inalienable right, and manages to speak around the mess that his heart has devolved to, rampaging behind his ribs. He breathes, unsteadily, “I thought he would be there when I came to.”_ _

__“Do you believe he owed that to you?” Dr. Lecter asks carefully, clinically._ _

__He’s obviously intrigued, but he’s keeping it light, which Will appreciates. It all feels less personal and unclothed when it’s treated this way, like something already revealed being aired out rather than something tightly bound in thick cloth stripped bare and left to freeze or be seized at will—a trauma quite identical to that of his fall. Will doesn’t look away. “I just thought he would want it, like I wanted it.”_ _

__Lecter’s eyebrows twitch down once. “This is the same individual you’ve told me any number of times that you mean to kill the next time you meet him. Even Jack Crawford and his team know of those intentions.”_ _

__“It isn’t personal, that we’ll end up dead soon.” Will shrugs, though it means everything in the world to him. “Everything else _is_ —not just the possessions or the encephalitis or…or the abandonment.” He winces at the fragile break in the final word. Will takes a slow, patient sip of his wine, savoring the taste and inky glide of it over his tongue and murmurs, on a sigh, “Tenochtitlan.”_ _

__He feels Dr. Lecter’s nod behind him and finishes his wine in a few big, unwise gulps, dismissing it as a reward for being forthcoming, finally, with a single person. Between his emotional crisis in the hospital when Lecter allowed Will to muffle his pitiful weeping and moaning in the barrier he made of fabric and flesh, the Hobbses, and Kamael, Will hasn’t been able to hide from Dr. Lecter the way he’s taught himself to do with everyone else._ _

__It’s a part of being human, or so he’d picked up, that there is a line between that which happens privately and that which happens publically. Ever since the hospital sent him home with Lloyd, he’s learned to withhold the better parts of himself until they’ve been earned._ _

__Beverly didn’t like it, and it about broke Lloyd’s heart once he started to notice Will’s withdrawal, but they didn’t try to take it from him. He thinks they understand how important it is for him to make decisions of his own, to be the king of his own life as much as he feasibly can. Jack supports the move, and Alana supports Will. He’s come to think of Dr. Lecter as the neutral space between them: between Jack and Alana, and between Will and them—a buffer, a thing of safety rather than restriction._ _

__“You’re convinced that your deaths are the only outcome; you speak as if they are, in fact, inevitable.”_ _

__“I believe they are,” Will says quietly, setting his drained glass down gingerly atop a loose stack of papers on Dr. Lecter’s desk._ _

__Matching his tone, Lecter asks, “Can you be so certain?”_ _

__“With Ose?” Will smiles, an almost beatific swell settling over and inside him. “Never.”_ _

__“Tell me, Will,” Dr. Lecter says, striding evenly away from the window toward and around his desk so that he’s in front of Will again. “Is that what attracted you to him in the first place?” A short silence drifts up between them like mist, and the doctor clears his throat. “I don’t mean to cross a line in asking, but we established previously that appearances are deceiving. I’m only curious as to what you see when you look in the mirror at your reflection.”_ _

__Tiredly, Will asks, “Lately, Doctor?”_ _

__“Now; seven hundred years ago; a thousand.” Dr. Lecter studies him for a few seconds and says, “Yes.”_ _

__The answer teases a smile onto Will’s face. In the spirit of that connection—even if it isn’t the point along two celestial tracks where one star can chance colliding with another star—he replies, “Garrett Jacob Hobbs, a foolish infant of a man, and something I can only describe as clumsily Pleistocene.”_ _

__“Lethal and overlarge?” Dr. Lecter asks readily._ _

__Will laughs, “Vaguely mammalian.”_ _

__Dr. Lecter ducks his head, a smile playing on his lips that makes Will feel warm right in his stomach. It reminds him of Matthew Brown and his unconventional kindness, and it reminds him of Alana Bloom asking him what kind of love he felt for Ose: Agape or Eros._ _

__He glances at his watch, not wanting to spoil this night while he’s still ahead—a funnily nuanced thing Brian taught him to appreciate his second night out of the hospital when the team took him out for dinner._ _

__“It’s late,” he announces softly, half-wishing that it weren’t. “I’ve still got a drive ahead of me. I should go.”_ _

__“Do come back if your ride hasn’t arrived,” Dr. Lecter says, just as accommodatingly as Will ever expects him to be._ _

__“Yeah, thanks.” Will nods, walking back with Lecter toward the door. “And…thank you, for telling me.”_ _

__“It wasn’t my truth to tell,” he argues, keeping his expression neutral but soft. “Perhaps you shouldn’t drive tonight.”_ _

__“Diligence, Doctor?”_ _

__Dr. Lecter smiles and opens the door for the fourth time tonight. “Naturally. Good night, Will.”_ _

__“Good night.”_ _

__The air outside is crisp and cool with lingering accents of heat simmering upward from the sun-warmed concrete underfoot. Will looks around the adequately lit car lot and fishes the phone Beverly bought him out of his pocket. It’s strange and too-small, and his fingers haven’t adjusted to the touch screen yet, but she insisted he learn to navigate the interface for ease of use later. He calls Lloyd when he doesn’t see his car anywhere on the property._ _

__“Will, hey. Appointment run late?”_ _

__He hears something sizzling noisily in the background, and his mouth waters. He hadn’t eaten anything before driving Lloyd’s car to Dr. Lecter’s practice, and Lloyd probably hadn’t started dinner until a little while ago since he had to drive back after dropping him off. Will connects the dots and murmurs, “Just a little bit later than usual. Do I need to call a cab?”_ _

__“Oh, no, I asked Matthew if he’d bring you home.”_ _

__Will frowns. He hadn’t spoken to Matthew since before the nurse was killed in Chilton’s hospital. He sighs, put out by association. “Isn’t that an imposition?”_ _

__“I bribed him with dinner,” Lloyd protests. “He likes steak; I’m making steak. He also likes you, and what do you know, you’re going to be home tonight—well, in approximately forty five minutes if you drive like a maniac, which you _do_ , by the way.”_ _

__“No, I don’t,” Will complains, using Lloyd’s tone right back at him. “It’s not helpful to either of us that you encourage his attentions, Lloyd.”_ _

__“He’s a grown man, William,” Lloyd chides him in an overly pretentious, dramatic voice. “The minute you start protesting for yourself, I will back off.”_ _

__Will opens his mouth and thinks of how to respond when he sees headlights sliding toward him from up the street. He recognizes Matthew’s car from a ways off, eyes struggling in the dark._ _

__Sounding far too pleased with himself, Lloyd teases, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”_ _

__“He’s here. Don’t start without us. I’ve been told that’s rude.”_ _

__“It is, and I wouldn’t dream of it.” There’s a pause. Will hears footsteps and claws scratching on the floorboards. “Hey, Will, if you had a problem with him being around, you’d tell me, right? If it made you uncomfortable, I mean.”_ _

__“Yes, Lloyd.” He steps off the sidewalk and waves his free hand when Matthew brings the car around. “We’ll be home in a bit.”_ _

__“Be safe, Willy.”_ _

__“You can’t call me William and Willy in the same night,” Will tells him irately as he’s rounding the front of the car and opening the passenger side door. Over the hood of the car he sees the blinds of Dr. Lecter’s office window shiver. “Goodbye, Lloyd.”_ _

__“Hmm,” he hums, sensitive still about farewells and justifiably so._ _

__“Hey, Will. You don’t want to drive tonight?” Matthew leans a bit to one side to look up at Will. “Lloyd said you were learning.”_ _

__“I am,” he concedes, sliding into his seat and tucking the cell phone daintily into the front pocket of his jeans. “We had wine with therapy tonight.”_ _

__“Sounds rich,” Matthew muses, sounding warm and amused and nice, after not hearing from him for a while._ _

__He turns the key and switches gears. Apparently he thought Will’s phone call would take longer than it did. His car runs smoothly enough, though the engine doesn’t rev proudly like Beverly’s or purr contentedly like Alana’s. It’s a healthy cross between the two and doesn’t stall or chug. Matthew freezes up a bit, timidity creeping into his demeanor. “Lloyd invited me for dinner. Is that okay?”_ _

__Will nods and tries for a smile that comes naturally enough. “Yeah, it’s fine.”_ _

__They drive for about fifteen minutes with the radio turned down but audible on some whimsical Jazz station. Will keeps his eyes trained out the window and slumps in his seat, hanging onto the barely there wisps of intoxication nudging at his senses. Right after they get off the exit, Matthew takes the car to a well-lit supermarket just off the turn and maybe a ten minute drive out from Lloyd’s house._ _

__Matthew checks their surroundings and gauges Will’s expression before killing the engine, slow with his hands and wearing an innocent look on his face. In a voice that doesn’t sound like his own, he tells Will, “I’m sorry I didn’t take your call.”_ _

__“There were extraordinary circumstances. You were under a lot of pressure.”_ _

__Matthew shakes his head. “It was…I couldn’t believe that he did it. After Chilton, I thought it—that it left him, but he killed her. He had no idea that he did it, even. You _saw_ him after. He wasn’t even _there_. Chilton’s beside himself, just a Goddamn wreck.”_ _

__“Has anything changed with him?” Will asks of Abel Gideon._ _

__“Some days he gets a few minutes, but it’s like talking to a dementia patient. He’s never lucid long enough to have a real conversation. The short bursts of coherency that find him ruin him all over again, every time.”_ _

__Will swallows and lays his head back against the seat, eyes pinching shut and staying that way for as long as the silence between them stretches. There’s rain outside, just enough for there to be a gentle pat-pat-pat of tiny raindrops hitting the windshield. He thinks it’ll stop by the time they get to the house with how gentle it is._ _

__“It was Ose,” Matthew says in a tiny, confidential voice. His eyes are wide and shiny but unseeing. When he speaks again after a long pause he sounds much younger than Will knows he is. “Gideon…when it had him, he…”_ _

__Will sighs quietly and murmurs, “I know.”_ _

__“He called you Barbas,” he whispers, searching Will’s face with his scared, bewildered eyes. “He said you’re not Will Graham but that you’re Barbas. He said not to trust you. Why did…why did he single you out?”_ _

__Will watches him, weary and heavy with a resigned kind of sadness emphasized by relief. Matthew doesn’t believe the lie that was fed to him. He believes Will, though he was warned not to. Softly, gratefully, he says, “I think it was more for Chilton’s benefit than for yours that he said it.”_ _

__Matthew bites his lip and looks away. “Who are you, really?”_ _

__“It’s not who I am.” Will shakes his head when Matthew gives him a brief, bewildered glance. “It’s what I was.”_ _

__There’s a charged, oddly intense moment where Will feels like he might fall out of the car and onto the cold, wet ground. It’s strange to think that Matthew could have any kind of power to make him feel that way without doing anything to reinforce the reaction. If he asked, right now, for a deeper, more comprehensive history, Will would give it to him. He would lay it all out and leave it for Matthew to believe or deny as he chose—because there is always a choice, and if Will is given the opportunity to decide for himself he will extend that privilege to Matthew as well._ _

__But Matthew surprises him, maybe both of them, judging by the expression on Matthew’s face, and asks instead, “Barbas? Ose?”_ _

__“They’re different, but not in the way that I’m different,” Will explains, patient about his words and cautious of all the various things they could mean. “They’re like bacteria, and we’re like the fruits collected at harvest. We fall when we’re overripe, and they grow opportunistically whenever given the chance for life.”_ _

__“What does that make us?” Matthew asks shakily, wrapping his head around the far oversimplified model Will has given him._ _

__Speaking as gently as he can, Will tells him, “It makes you human.”_ _

__Matthew nods, breathing out a shaky exhale and drumming trembling fingers on the steering wheel. “Okay.”_ _

__“Death follows me like a disease. That was the case even before the vine rejected me.”_ _

__“Why did it reject you?” Matthew gives him a wary look out the corner of his eye. “What made you overripe?”_ _

__Will opens his mouth and drops his eyes, feeling unprecedentedly guilty at the answer. “I made…a mistake.” He cringes at what feels significantly less substantial than the truth. “The punishment fits the crime, and I’m still…struggling to see it as a mistake.”_ _

__Matthew cracks a sad smile, the sheen of tears in his eyes making his face look vulnerable and innocent. “You’d be more bacteria than human if you never had second thoughts about the bad things you’ve done.”_ _

__He searches Will’s face, and the corners of his eyes wrinkle just a little bit at whatever it is that he finds there. It puts Will at ease in a way he almost can’t explain but that he’s felt too often with his new friends not to draw comparisons, although it’s different now—the fleeting, always shifting _now_. Lloyd gives him safety, and Beverly gives him care; Jack gives him security, and Alana gives him compassion; Jimmy and Brian give him laughter. Kamael gave him knowledge. Dr. Lecter gives him clarity. Abigail Hobbs gives him purpose._ _

__And then Matthew. Will blinks and clears his throat around a giddy, breathless chuckle. “I thought you had a proclivity for dangerous men because you enjoyed the risk, but that’s not it at all, is it?”_ _

__Matthew’s expression doesn’t flicker. His face stays just the same, and Will is…so happy that it does._ _

__Because he’s amazed and because he’s thinking about reflections, he remarks, “All you want is to help.”_ _

__He holds Will’s eyes for a few long, admittedly enjoyable seconds and then closes his eyes, a weak smile twitching over his mouth. Matthew murmurs, “I’m no saint.”_ _

__“I know.”_ _

__Will watches Matthew nod once to himself and then open his eyes, hand going for the key and turning it. “Lloyd’ll be waiting to eat right about now.”_ _

__“He said he made steak for you,” Will tells him in a soft, casual voice. “I think he enjoys having you around.”_ _

__Matthew huffs a laugh and turns the radio up a bit louder but not enough to discourage conversation. “Lloyd’s a good guy.”_ _

__“Yeah, he is.”_ _

__They drive for a while on the darkened back roads, and Matthew turns his head toward Will without taking his eyes off the road—a gesture Will likes as he doesn’t feel quite so endangered that way. He says, only just speaking above the music, “You’re a good guy, too. Everybody makes mistakes.”_ _

__He doesn’t tell Matthew how much he enjoyed what he did, but there doesn’t seem to be any need for further explanation. Matthew understands well enough. He understands and demands nothing in return. They don’t speak again._ _

__Lloyd is standing on the porch with a beer when they drive up to the house. The cage they use to take Winston to the vet is out, and there’s a dog inside it with predominantly dark brown fur and a smattering of white down the chest and one arm. Will makes a beeline for the cage with a bewildered expression on his face and his hand out to Lloyd in a silent question._ _

__“Found her wandering the highway while the two of you conspired to starve me,” he says in the way of an explanation, shrugging when Will looks at him. Matthew has an entertained look on his face, eyes trained on the mysterious new dog._ _

__“Her? Are we keeping her?”_ _

__“She’s friendly.” Lloyd nods his head toward Winston (Churchill). “He doesn’t mind her too much.”_ _

__“What’ll her name be?”_ _

__“I don’t know. Thought I’d leave it with you. Anyway, we should eat. I can make you guys plates and bring them out back? If you can just take her and the cage around to the back porch? I’ll bring Winston inside with me.”_ _

__“Yeah, I got the cage,” Matthew volunteers, raising one hand and approaching the cage with a healthy amount of caution but not enough to set the lovely canine on edge. He leans down to offer his hand and smiles serenely when she gives him a cursory sniff. “Got a leash?”_ _

__Lloyd hands it off. “Yep. Will? Can you take her?”_ _

__“Absolutely.” He introduces himself to the dog as Lloyd walks into the house and calls Winston after him. The beautiful brunette trots happily out of the cage when Matthew opens the door. She lets Will attach the leash to the collar Will recognizes as Winston’s unofficial “out-in-public” collar without kicking up any kind of fuss._ _

__Matthew lifts the cage easily, the thin, short sleeves of his shirt neither strained nor dwarfing the swell of muscles in his arms—and what of it that Will notices? They walk in step with each other as they take the new dog around the side of the house._ _

__“You’re good, too,” Will tells him quietly while Lloyd continues to move around in the kitchen getting their food. He smiles when Matthew does and works on teaching the brown dog at his feet to shake his hand._ _

__It’s a good night to come home to family, even if he did miss a gorgeous winter. He’s sure where he wasn’t before that there will be more of them for him to see. Where he used to be relieved that he would meet an end sooner rather than never, the knowledge presently fills him with bittersweet sadness. That melancholy is saturated with a delirious, winded happiness that he gets to be alive at all._ _

__Will guides the dog back into the cage when he sees Lloyd gathering silverware and sits in one of the three chairs Matthew pulled out while Will had his hands full lavishing attention on their guest, whose name Will is still trying very hard to find. He thinks of names that feel like home and homecoming, names that make an old soul feel young and rejuvenated._ _

__Matthew sits on his right, leaving the one on Will’s left free for Lloyd. He reaches over and brushes his knuckles along Will’s arm, eyes trained fondly on the dog Will looks away from to look at him. Matthew swallows once, eyes looking glossy again but not with the frightened sheen of wild, helpless tears. He smiles and squeezes Will’s arm. Will’s mouth drops open just a fraction, and he says, “Penelope.”_ _

__The gleam in Matthew’s eyes dances, like a small but brilliant flame licking a black canopy of night sky. “Why?”_ _

__“Because when Odysseus comes home after losing his ship and his men, he still had his wife.” Will licks his lips, all of his attention honed in on the relaxed weight settled on his arm, even as his eyes don’t falter for a second. “He still had Penelope.”_ _

__Matthew’s hand falls gently into his lap, his easy, slightly splayed posture putting Will at ease, too. “Did you read about it like everyone else, or did you see it from your tree?”_ _

__“A little bit of both.” Will smirks and stands to get the door for Lloyd when he hears him trying to lever it open with his hip. “Her name is Penelope.”_ _

__“Classic,” Lloyd notes with an obvious twitch of his eyebrows that makes Will roll his eyes, which in turn causes Lloyd to pout. “I’m hilarious. Get my plate for me, please?”_ _

__Will heads inside and fumbles in the fridge for the pitcher of unsweetened iced tea Lloyd taught him to make just last night. Matthew says something that gets a booming laugh from Lloyd, and Will smiles to himself, taking a minute to lean against the counter and preserve this quiet, domestic night in his mind for the eventual wreckage that will come to splinter what’s left of him._ _

__He wonders if Odysseus took his time to treasure small comforts after hearing Tiresias’ prophecy—if he took stock of all his men’s faces and if he took extra care to remember their little eccentricities and quirks, knowing perfectly well that they would be taken from him._ _

__And how much more precious Penelope must have been to him, then. How precious she always must have been._ _

__How very lucky Odysseus was to have known, to have always known, before the storm hit, that she would save a place for him in their home and be there for him when he survived the hell their gods inflicted upon him._ _

__Will takes Lloyd’s plate outside and doubles back for the pitcher and plastic cups. He eats his steak and lets Matthew and Lloyd converse around them. Since their first meeting, the two of them have grown much more comfortable in their interactions with each other—or Matthew has. Lloyd is always comfortable, with most people, which Will likes, even if sometimes he finds it a little bit confusing._ _

__Lloyd and Matthew are friends, maybe, or something at least more exclusive than acquaintances, which is good enough for Will, for now. Even if he doesn’t know who will be there on the other side of the flames once he’s done whatever it is he must do before he is free, he doesn’t have to leave _them_ alone._ _

__Winston sniffs at Penelope’s tail a few yards off where they left the cage. Matthew spills tea on himself, and Lloyd squawks when a bug flies up his nose. Will loves them, the dogs and the humans and the trees whispering around them and the dead stars overhead and so far out of reach. He loves his mistakes and his shortcomings and his good deeds and his triumphs. His sin and his good intentions and his corruptibility make him more like humans than bacilli, more like a person than a beast._ _

__When Lloyd skips inside to switch the fork he dropped for a clean one, Will reaches over and squeezes Matthew’s forearm right beneath his elbow where the skin curves outward with firm, relaxed muscle. Matthew brushes his fingertips over the back of Will’s hand and drops his hand back into his lap. A few seconds later Will returns to his food._ _

__Lloyd comes back outside and sets his fork down, jostling his steak knife off the worn wooden table and onto the floor in the process. Will just barely hears Lloyd cursing under his and Matthew’s combined laughter._ _

__He loves them, fiercely, and with the certainty and clarity that no matter what happens to separate them, nothing will ever change the fact that he does. It’s enough to love them. It’s enough that they can have this happiness now, _right now_ , even as one moment tumbles into the next and the future constantly rolls back into their ever-growing past and elusive present._ _

__Matthew nudges Will’s foot under the table when Lloyd ducks into the house again. Will nudges him back, aware of what he’s doing and unafraid of it._ _

___To the truth behind the illusion, and all its consequences._ _ _

__Matthew maintains a polite distance, and Lloyd comes back to the table, excessively careful about setting his knife down on the safe side of his plate that isn’t near an edge. The bugs hum in the trees, and Will thinks about winter and the summertime that will precede it._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From Fuller’s _Hannibal_ (S2 E13: _Mizumono_ ): “An imago is an image of a loved one. Buried in the unconscious.”
> 
> Also from S2 E13, _Mizumono_ : “To the truth, then…and all its consequences.”
> 
> “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”  
> http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter titles and lyrics by Johnny Cash.


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